Conditioning Lab essays

Conditioning Lab essays Throughout life, we, as a society, are subjected to numerous situations, where we are conditioned to react in a certain manner. In the lab session, we experienced operant conditioning where one is conditioned to a stimulus, and then reinforced based on that stimulus. There are two types of reinforcers, primary and secondary. Primary reinforcers consist of primary needs such as food and water, and it also is anything that causes harm that you can avoid. On the other hand, a secondary reinforcer is something learned, such as receiving good grades or candy. The experiment in class explored this aspect of learning, through the means of a virtual lab rat. There were two parts to the experiment, during the first part of the experiment, we had to record the number of times the rat scratched himself, licked himself, pressed the bar down, raised himself on two feet, and drank water. This section was timed for 10 minutes. Initially, this task became quite confusing because we were not sure what the actions were, and also the actions were occurring so fast, that both people watching to keep a count became quite overwhelming. Thus I read out the actions, and then my partner recorded the number of times it occurred. The majority of the actions performed by the rat were raises. The second section of the first part of the experiment comprised of keeping positively reinforcing the rat for performing a specific action of your choice. This segment was timed and allowed the experimenter to view a conditioned response to a conditioned stimulus. The stimulus we chose was the action of licking himself. Every time the rat would lick himself, I would press the space bar, thus releasing the pellet of food into his bowl. It did take a while to condition, but eventually the subject became conditioned to the specified action. The second section of the experiment was to time and record how many times he performed the actions, as in the f...