PSYCH 1X03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Edward Thorndike, Table Tennis, Reinforcement

• School: McMaster University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCH 1X03
• Professor: Joe Kim

Document Summary

Instrumental conditioning involves explicit training between voluntary behaviours and their consequences. If you touch a hot stove, you"re going to be burned. If you misbehave in kindergarten, you"re going to get a time out: in each of these examples, a specific behaviour leafs to a specific consequence. Instrumental conditioning is all about learning the contingency between behaviours and their consequences. Mike is a ta leading a weekly tutorial of students in a psychology course. Despite his best efforts to engage the class, he finds that after a few weeks, his students begin arriving later and later and it is disrupting his class. Mike devises a plan to ensure students arrive promptly any student who shows up on time for a tutorial gets the draw for a card from a standard deck. Every 5 tutorials, the student who can make the best poker hand from their cards wins a gift card to a book store.