In the beginning of the chapter "Opening Skinner's Box," Lauren Slater acknowledges B.F. Skinner's remarkable ability to conduct experiements with animals, and had many great successes with them. However, Slater would remind us in her own opinion that he had used his baby daughter was an experiment too. Skinner's plan with his daughter was to "shape" her behavior, as he demanded from the rest of his experimentations. Furthermore, Slater continuously questions Skinner's motives for everything, from changing his career to examinating his daughter in a box. Slater eventually had decided to verify this by calling for Skinner's other daughter, Julie Vargas.…
Matt Noah Summer Assignment AP Psychology 30 August 2017 Book Review Opening Skinner’s Box: Summary: This book consists of ten chapters each with its own short story, each of which containing an experiment. In the first chapter author Lauren Slater talks about the work done by psychologist B.F. Skinner, mainly about his experimentation and the controversy over his methods. He believed positive reinforcement worked better in establishing behavior than negative reinforcement. Chapter 2 talks about Stanley Milgram and describes Milgram's obedience to authority experiment, shocks were simulated to see if the subject would be obedient. The results of the experiment showed that 65% of people would obey the orders of a credible authority, even if it was to the extent hurting another human.…
Classical conditioning experiments have been performed on humans with a large degree of success. One of the most notable and most controversial classical conditioning experiments done on humans was Watson’s “Little Albert” experiment. This experiment was conducted to test the fear response in humans. The experiment started off by introducing Albert to several animals, a white rat, monkey, bunny and a dog (Creelan). When Albert started to play with the rat, Watson banged a hammer on a metal pipe scaring Albert causing him to cry. Over time the sight of the rat without the banging of the hammer caused Albert to cry. Albert associated the loud scary noise to touching the rat, thus being successfully conditioned to fear the rat. By today’s standards, this experiment would never be allowed due to the ethical standards set forth by the American Psychological Association…
_____________ disputed Pavlov’s ideas in the early 20th century and established that the associations between stimuli and responses mold or shape learning and associations through repetition.…
The experiment was done at the University of Texas at Tyler in the BEP building. There were three different tanks with Betta fish and each group performed the assigned experiment with the fish. The first step was to test how aggressive the fish was by slowly moving a mirror to the side of the fish tank and observe the fish response to its own reflection. This procedure lasted for one minute and then the results were recorded. The next step was to take a piece of construction paper that was similar in color to the fish and construct a model to the fish, glue it onto the applicator stick and to slowly present the model to the fish. While presenting the model to the fish, results of how the fish acted toward to stimuli was being recorded by another group member. When the observation was over we took responses that we conducted with the fish we used in the experiment and compared the results of another group’s responses.…
The work of Ivan Pavlov, considered conditioned learning theory. His findings were with experiments on dogs. He discovered if you repeatedly learned a process over time you would condition…
B.F. Skinner is well known for his work on behaviorism and operant conditioning. He also once said that free will was an illusion. He firmly believes that everything we do is because of conditioning. He was inspired by Pavlov and Watson’s work so much that he went to Harvard for it.…
Many pioneering researchers have devoted their careers to understanding how we learn. These researchers included Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, John Garcia, B.F. Skinner and Albert Bandura. Ivan Pavlov researched classical conditioning. This is a type of learning in which one learns to link two or more stimuli and anticipate events. Pavlov researched a dog and how it began to salivate at the sight of food, the bowl for the food, the person delivering the food, and even the sound of the person’s approaching footsteps. Pavlov discovered that a neutral stimulus when paired with a natural reflex producing stimulus will begin to produce a learned response. For example at school when the lunch bell begins we begin to salivate. Pavlov’s work laid the foundation for John B. Watson’s ideas. Watson had an idea of behaviorism which said that psychology should be an objective science based on observable behavior. Watson wanted to focus on how organisms respond to stimuli in their environments.…
During the 1890s Ivan Pavlov ran an experiment based on innate response. His experiment was based of dogs and their behavior with potential stimuli. In this situation the stimuli was food, and their salivary response to food. The study was conducted when Pavlov would ring a bell before every meal; therefore, the dogs would know it would be dinnertime. After duration of ringing the bell before meals the dogs would expect to receive food every time and the bell would ring. In response to bell and the expectancy of food the dogs would…
For example, the little Albert experiment which was carried out by Watson and Rayner, where they conditioned an infant boy, which they called Albert B also known as little Albert, to fear a white rat. This experiment was the first ever study within psychology that proved classical conditioning can transpire within humans not just within animals.…
In 1898, Edward Thorndike accentuated the strengths and weaknesses of stimulus-response connections with the introduction of the theory of learning. The premise of Thorndike’s research implied that rewards and punishment have distinct yet an equal impact on human behaviors. However, one of the more well-known learning theorists in modern times is B.F. Skinner, who shares comparable behavioral observation as Thorndike, in that behaviors are learned as a consequence of actions. Further testing of this theory, Skinner developed the prominently distinguished Skinner box, which observed animal training and behaviors. Initially, the Skinner box was used to detect the behaviors of rats. A metal bar is positioned in an area of the experimental…
In the 1890’s a famous psychology experiment was conducted by Ivan Pavlov which demonstrated classical conditioning in dogs. According to The Free Dictionary, classical conditioning is, “a learning process by which a subject comes to respond in a specific way to a previously neutral stimulus after the subject repeatedly encounters the neutral stimulus together with another stimulus that already elicits the response.” Around the 1920’s, famous psychologist John B. Watson along with a graduate student, Rosaline Rayner wanted to further the research of classical conditioning and see the effects it could have on people rather than just animals. The experiment that was conducted in order to further Pavlov’s research is known as the “Little Albert”…
The experiment was performed sometime prior to 1920, the results from the experiment were published in February 1920 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. The experiment was to expand on Pavlov’s classical conditioning experiments that were performed on dogs to see how it would work on humans. The experiment’s subject was a nine-month-old baby only known as “Albert B”. Albert was exposed to a series of stimuli and various…
Learning leads to a change in the strength of synaptic connections and also strengthen the communication between the nerve cells that help a certain behavior. A set of synaptic connections between two neurons can be modified or altered in either way, strengthened or weakened and its all based on the type of learning. Kandel uses three types of learning, habituation sensitization and classical conditioning. Habituation is the way that an organism can be accustomed to a stimulus through repetition. Habituation is the most important idea he used on his Aplysia.…
Thorndike's Experiment on cat in the puzzle is widely known and often quoted in psychology of learning. The experimental set up was very simple. A hungry cat was confined in a puzzle box and outside the box a dish of food was kept. The cat, in the box had to pull a string to come out of the box. The cat in the box made several random movement of jumping, dashing and running to get out of the box. The cat atlast succeeded in pulling the string. The door of the puzzle box opened, the cat came out and ate the food. He promtly put the cat to next trial. The cat again gave a lot of frantic behaviour but it soon succeeded in pulling the string. It repeated for several time, Thorndike noticed as the repetition increases the error also reduced i.e., Thorndike's cat showed slow, gradual and continous improvement in performance over successive trials. He concluded that learning of cat in the puzzle box can be explained in term of formation of direct connectionism between stimulus and response.…