A very important aspect of Skinner’s contribution is related to his passion for creating innovative technical means. He was, in fact, responsible for the idea of the so-called “Skinner box”, a particular cage where the experimental animal was subjected to controlled and reproducible conditioning procedures. Its diffusion was so wide that even today its updated versions are part of the daily arsenal of those who do research in animal psychology. In this Psychology-Online article we will see together What is the Skinner box, and what does this experiment consist of at the basis of operant conditioning?.
What is Skinner box
Skinner took up the studies of and by Edward Lee Thorndike and deepened them: Thorndike’s work on “instrumental” learning was later expanded by Skinner, who built another box, the Skinner box, very similar to the “problem box”: a cage in which a laboratory mouse can activate a food pellet dispensing mechanism by pressing a lever.
The improvement of the procedure and the experimental apparatus, the Skinner Box, by Skinner himself, has made it possible to highlight and quantify the relationship between independent variables (discriminant stimulus and reinforcing stimulus) with the dependent variable (frequency of behavioral responses), avoiding the interference of other variables that had influenced the relationships emerging from the experimental apparatus prepared by Thorndike.
What is the Skinner box experiment?
Skinner’s (1938) box experiment is simple: a rat was placed in a closed, acoustically isolated cage, so that the animal was not reached by external stimuli. In the cage there was a small lever whose pressure caused a ball of food to fall. The lever was also connected to an external pen: when the lever was lowered, the pen marked the paper that ran on a roller, thus allowing the frequency with which the lever was lowered to be recorded. This device was called a “skinner box.”
How does the Skinner box work? The rat in the cage, exploring the environment and moving at will, press the lever sooner or later, causing the food ball to fall. Sometimes, it is observed that the leverage is reduced regularly. The rat presses the lever several times in a short period of time, and the intervals between the presses coincide with the time needed to eat the food ball; after which the lever is not pressed for a certain period of time, because the animal is satiated, then, after a while, The rat goes decisively to the lever, begins to press and eat.
Next, we will see the objective of the Skinner box
Skinner box target
His main interest was understanding how human behavior changes depending on the effect: If there is a pleasant consequence, the subject tends to repeat the behavior. If, on the other hand, the response is unpleasant, the subject tends to abandon a behavior.
In order to study operant behaviors, Skinner introduced a variation on the problem cage that Thorndike used: the Skinner box in fact made it possible to systematically study the behaviors of animals (initially rats, then almost exclusively pigeons) under controlled conditions. The Skinner cage allows us evaluate how reinforcement acts on the operational response, examining the increase in the rate at which the behavior manifests itself. His interest did not reside in the unconditional stimulus-conditioned stimulus association, as in the case of Pavlov, but in the possibility of modifying the frequency of occurrence of a spontaneously arising behavior, by administering reinforcement.
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Skinner box theory
It is not always possible to identify the stimulus that provokes a response, or it is not always a stimulus that provokes the response: in these cases, according to Skinner, It is the associative link that is established between response (behavior) and reinforcement (consequence) that determines learning and, therefore, the maintenance of behavior.
As can be seen, there is no initial stimulus that pushes the rat to press the lever: however, once the lever has been accidentally pressed, the presentation of the food reinforces the action that has determined its dosage. Learning is then “displaced” in the relationship between “action” (which Skinner and behaviorists continue to indicate as “response”) and “reinforcement”, which causes this initially random behavior to be maintained by the subject.
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Skinner and operant conditioning
Skinner considers this paradigm a form of conditioning, and calls it “operant conditioning” to highlight the difference with Pavlov’s conditioning, which is called “responder.” In the latter case, the response is elicited by a stimulus and the reinforcement is correlated with the stimulus; In Skinnerian conditioning, on the contrary, it is the response that determines reinforcement, and therefore the response is “operant”, since there is no stimulus that determines it. If an operant behavior then acquires a relationship with a previous stimulation, then it can become a “discriminated operant behavior.”
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Bibliography
- Mandolesi, L., Passafiume, D. (2004). Psychology and psychobiology of learning. Milan: Springer-Verlag.
- Petta, A.M., Aragona, M. (2015). Perspectives on modern psychology. Rome: Cruce de Diálogos Association.