So when we're talking about
operant conditioning,
we're talking about emitting a voluntary response, in contrast with eliciting
an involuntary response and classical conditioning. You ring the bell, give food,
ring the bell, give food, you ring the bell, the dog doesn't think "let me now emit
some
saliva." It just gets pulled forth, right? Same thing with the acquisition of
phobias,
or the acquisition of taste aversions right? If you get assaulted on the corner you
don't go to that corner then and think, "well let me have an adrenalin reaction,"
it happens automatically right? Autonomically,
which is to say it's elicited from you, but
then leaving that situation so you don't feel like that anymore
is now a voluntary behavior, and you can do voluntary behaviors
so frequently that they become virtually automatic, right.
Have you ever entered in a password so many times and then the
system made you change your password? And then the next time you try to login you
did what?
Put in the old password, alright, because you've been doing it so much
that it became virtually automatic, but now it doesn't work anymore.
it doesn't bring reinforcement. Doesn't bring the consequence you wanted
so it starts to extinguish, and then doing the new password
is what does get reinforced. The more you do it, it takes on that
automatic quality again, so it develops a power.
So contingency is something, that's a word I want you to know.
Not only for your test, but in general. Contingencies are the circumstances.
The circumstances
determining which responses lead to which consequences
right? You all have certain situations you come into this room,
what does the situation call for? What's the contingency?
People come in, they sit down, they face forward,
they pull out notes and they start writing.
Right? That's a condition behavior, this happened over your lifetime, throughout
school,
and its something we do virtually automatically. Do you go to a party,
find a seat, sit down, face front, pull out some notes and start writing notes?
Probably not. Hopefully not, right? Because that contingency does not call
for that kind of behavior.
So certain circumstances will pull for certain responses and not for other ones,
in other words, some responses will be rewarded or reinforced in situations,
and in another situation those same responses might be punished
or not reinforced. Shaping is successfully,
successively, reinforcing
approximations towards a target behavior. What do I mean by that?
Tell a kid whose, I say four years old,
to tie his shoes. Tie your shoe, never tied a shoe before,
is that going to happen?
No. Maybe they're three and you say, ok, what do you start with? You say
"go get your shoes, no no no no two that match."
Right? Oh good, way to go, so now what am I doing?
Socially reinforcing. A lot of people think, "well I shouldn't have to reinforce behaviors that
people ought to be doing anyway." Well how do you learn?
That's how we learn. You don't just hand some shoes to a kid and go,
"you're supposed to know how to tie them anyway, so I'm not going to go, 'good job, look at you, you
got both shoes and they both match!"'
Right? No, ok, now put them on your feet,
put them on your feet. No, no, the other feet, see that little curve on the inside of the shoe?
See the little curve on the inside of your foot? Put this one on that foot,
and that one on that foot. Now I'm not going to reinforce going to get the shoes,
I'm going to reinforce putting them on the correct feet, right?
So now what I'm doing is successive approximations towards the target behavior,
the target behavior's a complicated behavior of tying shoes independently.
Now you got them on and I'm going to say, "ok you ready?"
Here's how you put, tell a kid to do it. Take the first string, take the second string,
throw the first one over the top of the first, the second one,
grab the second one with the first hand, take that underneath, pull it underneath,
through the little hole, cinch it down, put your finger over here and grab
the middle of this lace, pull it up, pinch it down so that you got a bunny ear,
take this now hanging string, wrap it around,
switch hands and hold that one, and go through that little tiny hole and grab that other string
and pull it, and
cinch it down. Got it?
Course not, right? Course not, that's complicated.
So you go ok, make the little cross. Look at that! You made the cross,
Now I'm not rewarding or reinforcing going to get the shoes,
I'm not talking about how good it was of you to put them on the right feet, now I'm
reinforcing
getting the first stage done right? Then it's the bunny ears, then its the double bunny ears,
and now it's like, "look at you!
you're doing it!" And it becomes self-reinforcing
right? Because now I say, they go "I want to go outside." You go, "not until you put on your shoes and tie them."
Oh, now I have a reason to go do it, eventually it becomes a semi-automatic
behavior that people don't appreciate,
how it was constructed to begin with. It was done in a shaping format,
and so there's a power to that. I shouldn't have to reinforce things that ought to be
done anyway.
Well, you ought to go to work. Shouldn't you go to work? Shouldn't everybody go to work?
Well yea,
would you do it if you weren't paid? Well hell no.
Oh, you need to be reinforced,
for doing that behavior you ought to do anyway right? Of course. Now could people do work
bad,
work behavior without getting money? Certainly, they could do voluntary
behavior right?
But aren't they getting something else? Social approval,
maybe a reference letter, feeling good themselves, about having done something
they feel
proud of. So reinforcement's not necessarily
tangibly handing somebody a gold star,
or a dollar bill, it's the idea that whatever consequences it
is, the organism, the individual values it enough that it would be
likely to repeat the response in a similar situation. If
it increases, its reinforcement. If it decreases its punishment.
Shaping is just going a little bit at a time, and I'll just pull those up together,
because they go together. We've already talked about those
in classical conditioning. They're the same thing, and if you'll remember back when I showed you
that graph and showed you again,
right? What we had was a phase in which you learned the behavior.
Which conditioning happens, right? Learning to tie the shoe eventually
results in a self-sustaining shoe tying behavior
but I could get extinction. What if I get a kid
who doesn't want shoes with laces, but wants shoes with
Velcro right? Or slip on shoes?
And maybe they learned it when they were three how to tie the shoe, but then they never
get a shoe tying experience again for five or six years,
might that go away? But upon relearning it, it will happened more quickly.
Spontaneously recovery wouldn't necessarily occur there,
but I'll show you how it might. But that's when reappearance of a previously reinforced behavior
happens without subsequent reinforcement.
Let's use that example of a password.
So I had my old password, I had to change it.
I put in the wrong one, I put in the old one again, well quickly I learned not to do
that.
It's not being reinforced anymore it's technically being punished because its not
getting me the consequence I want.
Well eventually I learn to use the new password. But sooner or later, and you've
probably had this experience, might be
two days, two weeks, two months, two years you put in the
old password again right? It just kind of becomes automatic and it tries it out. Now if it
worked,
you'd be quickly returning to the old password, but given that it probably won't,
you'll have it extinguished very quickly.
Stimulus generalization and stimulus discrimination also apply to operant
conditioning. Now the stimulus that
are more similar to the condition stimulus, produce condition responses,
that's generalization, stimuli less similar to the conditions stimulus
produce condition,
that do not produce, I'm sorry, conditioned responses,
that's discrimination meaning that they are discriminating
this non similar stimulus from the conditioned stimulus. And I'm going to use the same
example
but differentiate here in a second. Let me see if I can find that.
Let me go ahead and unhide that and pull it up.
So there's our example. I got bit by the German Shepard,
that's the conditioned stimulus. Originally, German Shepherd was neutral.
right?
He might even like the German Shepherd right? Now it's not all German Shepherds are
going to bit me,
and it wasn't the German Shepherd per se it was the bite itself that caused the
pain,
that made me now develop an aversion to the German Shepherd, the conditions
stimulus, especially that particular one right?
So the next time I see it, that was acquired in one-time, acquisition quick,
the next time I see that German Shepherd I get a
rush of adrenaline right? That's classically conditioned.
and if it's similar to the German Shepard, maybe its another German Shepard,
or maybe its a dog that has similar properties, if I still get adrenaline, that's classically
conditioned.
But if I get far enough away from the conditions stimulus, I don't get that
feeling,
that feeling being the adrenaline rush so that's not happening, but here's the thing:
when I get the adrenaline rush I don't like it because it makes me fearful of
the animal,
I then leave the situation.
Leaving the situation's a voluntary behavior isn't it?
But it becomes a powerful desire to get out of that situation.
and I could do it so much that it becomes automated,
that when I see that kind of dog I just automatically avoid it,
and I don't have that classical conditioning. So now what am I getting?
An automatic behavioral response, that would be operantly conditioned.
And I may or may not show the same response to similar
dogs, and the more dissimilar they get from the conditioned stimulus, well maybe I
don't avoid the cats.
And maybe I don't avoid the poodles, right? You see what I am saying?
But the avoidance itself is as a voluntary behavior which makes it operant
conditioning,
it's tied with the classical conditioning, which is why I think that's
decent graphic to show. I
made that one up myself you like it? Should have seen what it replaced.
It's really technical. But I think you can get that, you seem what I'm saying? That adrenaline rush you
feel
to the condition stimulus it was previously neutral, classical.
The leaving of the situation, that behavioral response is operant
conditioning.
And its likely to happen for reasons we're going to get into here shortly. Now
if I can get made to stay through systematic desensitization or
other kinds of exposure therapy to stay with the dog maybe it was just a bad day for
the dog and it don't want to bite me again.
Certainly other German Shepherds don't want to bit me again. If I stay in that situation
long enough, and the dog doesn't actually bite me, guess what happens?
I extinguish the anxiety response, it goes away.
because the dog no longer predicts getting bitten. By staying there are, I'm now
counteracting
the operant conditioning that would have normally led me to leave the situation
and that's part the treatment of phobias