PSYC-281 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Matching Law, Operant Conditioning, Organism

• School: MacEwan University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC-281
• Professor: A N O N Y M O U S

Document Summary

Simultaneous presentation of two or more independent schedules, each leading to reinforcer. Organism can choose between responding on one schedule vs another. Vi schedule of responses are systematic (known as the matching law) Overmatching: higher rate of responding: proportion of responses on richer schedule versus the poorer schedule is more of a difference than would be predicted by matching, example: Vi30s should have a richer response schedule (. 67) than the poorer vi60s schedule (. 33: overmatching: vi30s produces richer (. 80) and poorer schedules (. 20) than matching law predicted. The difference in responding between the richer and the poorer schedules is more than predicted by matching. Type of reinforcer provided: operant behavior should often be viewed in context, amount of reinforcement available influences behavior (e. g. we engage in high preferred activities before preferred activities if they are available). Matching explains how behaviour is distributed across various alternatives in a choice.