PSYC 3451 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Reinforcement, Operant Conditioning, Automaticity

• School: Northeastern University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 3451
• Professor: Terri M.Bright

Document Summary

Any condition, event or change in the world. Could be discriminative stimulus s d inside/outside the body. Any event or condition that sets occasion for response to occur. Consequences: functions of operant behavior: positive reinforcement, attention, something tangible, negative reinforcement, escape/avoidance, automatic positive reinforcement, automatic negative reinforcement, automatic and produced by behavior itself: sensory stimulation, behavior automatically reduces or eliminates aversive stimulus. Changes in the antecedent or consequence consistently change some aspect of the behavior (usually rate of occurrence) Behaviors that operate in the environment to generate consequences. Consequences control the future occurrence of operant behavior. Affects probability of similar responses occurring under similar conditions. The process of changing operant behavior through reinforcement or punishment. Don"t need to understand reinforcing consequences to change behavior. They select response classes not individual responses. Temporal relations between behavior and its consequences. As far as a learner is concerned the most important factor is time.