PSYCH 1X03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Slot Machine, Reinforcement, Mandelbrot Set
8 Mar 2013
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Definition: learning the contingency between behaviours and consequences. Thorndike"s experiment: put a cat in a box with a rope attached to the door, food was placed outside the box, thorndike recorded behaviours and escape times of cat. Hypothesis was that at first, the cat would show random behaviours in figuring how to escape the box. By accident, the cat would find the rope that opened the door during one trial. After that one trial, the cat would learn the contingency between the rope and the door. Estimated that in the initial trials, the time taken to escape was long, but as more trials progressed, the cat would take a few seconds to locate the rope and escape. Thorndike found that the frequency of random behaviours gradually decreased over time. Over several trials, the behaviours that did not lead to escape would occur less frequently, leaving only the correct target behaviour in place.
