PSYC 301 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Puzzle Box, Stereotypy, Learned Helplessness
16 Dec 2017
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Operant conditioning: working to get what you want. Driving too fast penalty ticket/merit points (aversive stimulus) Instrumental behavior: behavior that occurs because it was previously needed for producing certain consequences. Instrumental conditioning: procedures developed to study instrumental behavior. Edward thorndike: the first serious theoretical analysis of instrumental conditioning. He was studying animal intelligence and wanted to see if animals could act intelligently. He created a number of puzzle boxes. He put a hungry cat in the box. The cat can open the exit via a device such as a latch to get the food. Observation: as more trials were performed, the cat could escape the box faster. This means that they became more adept at performing these steps to acquire the results they wanted. At that time, human understanding was thought to be a series of insight learning. Thorndike thought that this type of animal learning demonstrated some difference between animals and human.
