Talk:Operant conditioning

message: What is it that needs simplyfing? Operant conditioning is difficult to understand and does not lend itself to simple explanations. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.216.61.5 (talk) 09:39, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think it's as complicated as phrases like "is the modification of behavior (the actions of animals) brought about by the consequences that follow upon the occurrence of the behavior." would make it seem.  Elf | Talk 04:31, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Simplification

message: * Mention the primary and antithetical approach to psychology-- Cognition. Cognition and Behaviorism are mutually incompatible.  Although the operant conditioning approach works well for some contexts (e.g. animal training), the cognitive approach accomplishes the same, but using a different mechanism.  
* Might be worth mentioning the failed application of Operant conditioning to human language learning, and Chomsky's critique (it's already in the behaviorism article).
* Add new section on Animal Training.  There is already an entry animal training, but note here the technical issues: Note examples of 'positive reinforcement' and 'positive punishment' training techniques.  Also note that although 'modern' animal trainers consider themselves to use OC, they often rely on techniques that are not strictly operant conditioning in the original Skinnerian sense, e.g. bridging.
Santaduck 03:13, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Suggestions for additions

message: At first it said the person worked w/ cats but then it said rats!! Which one is it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lilsaalex (talk • contribs) 15:41, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: ~ChocoboFreak~ Skinner worked with rats, Thorndike worked with cats. It appears to have been fixed. Somebody probably just got the two people mixed up. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 211.29.250.241 (talk) 23:35, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cat or rat? 

message: The consequences link doesn't really make sense.128.213.28.129 20:43, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What? You don't think a parlour game is a crucial piece of operant conditioning?  (Removed link.)  Elf | Talk 23:38, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Consequences 

message: New section includes this paragraph:
:"In dog training, the use of the prey drive, particularly in training working dogs, detection dogs, etc., the stimulation of these fixed action patterns, relative to the dog's predatory instincts, are the key to producing very difficult yet consistent behaviors, and in most cases, do not involve operant, classical, or any other kind of conditioning."
So I don't understand what the point is--that allowing the dog to indulge prey drive when they do something correct is NOT a positive reinforcement?  It seems to me like it is. Dog does the weave poles really fast, they get the tug toy. Dog doesn't go as fast, dog doesn't get to play tug.  How is that not a positive reinforcer?  Elf | Talk 00:55, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: ~ChocoboFreak: It seems like it is a positive reinforcer to me as well. "This is because the prey drive, once started, follows an inevitable sequence: the search, the eye-stalk, the chase, the grab-bite, the kill-bite". According to this, it seems close to being classical conditioning (in a way). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 211.29.250.241 (talk) 23:42, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Not clear on prey drive activity not being a reward

message: I was reading the section in the article on Thorndike and his theories, and noticed that there was a passing reference to Skinner's research on reinforcement, no doubt to do with the "Skinner Box" experiment. Considering he was one of the greatest researchers in this area of psychology, could a section be added to explain the principals and methodology of the experiment?
58.169.141.5 23:46, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  B.F Skinner 

message: For what it's worth, note in passing that Karen Pryor: Don't Shoot the Dog! defines negative reinforcement and punishment differently. To Pryor, the main difference is timing. A negative reinforcement is something disagreeable that the subject can immediately stop by changing his behavior. A punishment is something that happens later that the subject cannot immediately stop by changing his behavior. If Auntie frowns when I put my feet on the coffee table, and stops frowning when I take them off, that is what Pryor calls a negative reinforcement. If I get a bad grade on my report card that reflects all the work I haven't done in class this year, that is what Pryor calls a punishment. Pryor notes that even though punishment is everyone's favorite method of untraining unwanted behavior, it rarely works because the subject usually has difficulty connecting the punishment with the behavior; often, the subject learns to evade punishment instead.
The behaviorist psychologist H. J. Eysenck talks in similar terms in his book Psychology Is About People, Chapter 3. He insists on talking about positive and negative reinforcement instead of reward and punishment, despite the clumsiness of his preferred terms, because with rewards and punishments the timing may make it difficult for the subject to connect the result with the behavior. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 4.232.102.216 (talk) 20:28, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Negative reinforcement and punishment 

message: In the section "Factors that alter the effectiveness of consequences" I included the mention of how certain factors are the result of biology. For example, I mentioned that the principles of Immediacy and Contingency are the result of the statistical probability of dopamine to modify the appropriate synapses. However, the necessity of an entire section devoted to the biological basis of operant procedures is becoming clear. I used the dopamine reference only to support the section about "Factors that alter the effectiveness of consequences," but already more biological references have been added to that section. They are good references and should be kept, but they should be moved to their own section because they do not contribute anything to the subject of the section they are currently in. 
I think that the biological section should be the second section, placed right after the "Reinforcement, punishment, and extinction" section. It would be a good way to structure the article to first have exposition on reinforcement, punishment, and extinction procedures, then have a three-part section immediately following it to explain the neurophysiological effects of reinforcing stimulation, aversive stimulation, and extinction. An alternative to this might be to simply add such a discussion to each of the existing corresponding articles on reinforcement, punishment, and extinction. --Lunar Spectrum | Talk 00:31, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Potential section about biological basis of operant conditioning

message: Looking at the articles in question, I think that the Reinforcement article should not be merged into Operant Conditioning. The Reinforcement article has a good level of detail that makes itself stand as an article on its own. Adding to that the proposal to merge Schedules of Reinforcement into Reinforcement, and the amount of redundant content would bog down the entire article. I think that elements of the Schedule of Reinforcement article can be successfully merged into Reinforcement. But Operant Conditioning already does enough of an overview of reinforcement not to warrant Reinforcement being merged into it. That would detract from the broader focus of the Operant Conditioning article, which should be more about the modification of behavior (operant procedures) rather than the details about the tool used to modify behavior (reinforcement). Lunar Spectrum | Talk 01:11, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Regarding article merging

message: Having lot of material on reinforcement in the operant conditioning makes the article too large. Reinforcement deserves separate section than operant conditioning. Rather than a mergefrom the reinforcement, i suggest that appropriate sections be merged to reinforcement. The two articles - Schedule of reinforcement and reinforcement can be merged together Kpmiyapuram 12:17, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I completely agree and I think the older comments tend to agree along those lines as well. Nobody has really commented on it for a long while though, so I think I'm going to remove the merge tags from the operant conditioning article. I'll leave the merge tags referring to reinforcement and schedules articles though in case anyone wants to go ahead with it. Lunar Spectrum | Talk 02:49, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  merging with Reinforcement 

message: This section currently appears to have material that fits for "biological correlates of classical conditioning" and not those of operant conditioning.  Kpmiyapuram 13:51, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: If you mean the first paragraph for that section, that's just a case of a contributer using "conditioned stimulus" where "conditioned reinforcer" might be more accurate. I've had brief discussions on the matter with that contributer who comes from the position that the distinctions between classical and operant conditioning isn't as clear cut as previously thought (ex. he mentioned how unconditioned stimuli tend to also function as primary reinforcers or primary punishers). Although I come from the perspective of maintaining terminological consistency, I thought the point was a fair one so I left some of the language in the article as it was. As for the content in the second paragraph in that section, that's all about neuromodulators like dopamine and acetylcholine that correlate with the modification of the synapse (behavior) upon the delivery of a consequence, very much the domain of operant conditioning. Lunar Spectrum | Talk 06:15, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  i disagree about neuromodulators. That's bio- neuro- psychology, not operant conditioning. It shows the current cognitive bias that is trying to move away from the study of behavior which is what made operant conditioning such a powerful paradigm to begin with. --florkle 23:53, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: A purely behaviorist/conditioning approach was long ago shown to be flawed as a complete explanation for experimental findings in animals, and even within the realm of operant conditioning, its biological substrate is surely an important topic for discussion. To be sure, it is worth including references from authors with a more historical perspective who were vehement supporters of a behavioralism approach, but this article should also emphasize the modern understanding of operant conditioning, which, from what I've seen, is increasingly couched in terms of neural substrates and even, indeed, cognitive approaches. digfarenough (talk) 19:22, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Biological correlates of operant conditioning 

message: There is some material on Extinction (psychology) in a separate article but i see that the current article on operant conditioning discusses it at more length. perhaps the information could be reorganized or merged. Kpmiyapuram 14:18, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I think that a lot of the information in the extinction section would serve the article on Extinction (psychology) well. I think the reason I wrote it in the operant conditioning article was because it addresses the variable nature of operant behavior, but some reorganizing is definitely in order. Information about extinction bursts would go well in the extinction article. Information about extinction-induced variability can fit in both Extinction (psychology) and Shaping (psychology). Lunar Spectrum | Talk 03:44, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: After some brief research, I think the section on extinction-induced variability would be better if it were changed to "Operant variability" and it could be a good place to add other information about behavioral variability across various situations, not just during extinction. Will start moving some stuff around and see how it comes out. Lunar Spectrum | Talk 04:44, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Extinction 

message: I don't think it's accurate to relate Thorndike to Operant Conditioning. Skinner's operant was "discovered" by him alone. Thorndike used different terms and explanatory systems. This is very important. Lots of people examined learning in humans and animals before Skinner. None of that was "operant conditioning" because it relied on mediating structures ('expectations', 'drives', etc). The explanatory system is as important as the actual data (perhaps even more so).
Operants were also quantified in the operant chamber - Skinner's invention - which Thorndike did not use. 
Moreover it implies that Skinner's position is just another learning theory, and it is not. This is an attempt to rewrite in the dead theories of Thorndike as "operant" theories which have become popular, or scientifically validated. Thorndike was important in his little way. Put his theories on his own page, or change the name of the page to "instrumental learning". Operant = Skinner != Thorndike.
(-Florkle!)
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Florkle (talk • contribs) 07:25, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: (Psst. Normally new comments are added to the bottom of the discussion page--makes it easier to find them.) digfarenough (talk) 13:54, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Thorndike

message: Why are the sections "verbal behavior" and "four term contingency" at the beginning of the article? The latter seems unneeded and the former seems like it should go much later, if at all. And why do we have this paragraph arguing that Skinner's work wasn't based on Thorndike's? Is this information relevant to discussing what operant conditioning is? If anything, I think that should be moved to a separate history section. I'm also surprised reinforcement learning isn't linked in this article, but I'll toss that into the "see also" section now... digfarenough (talk) 13:53, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  it was there arguing the reverse. --florkle 23:51, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  that is not skinner's rationale & its not behaviorist. skinner rejected biological justifications - see functional relationship arguments, such as Chiesa's --florkle 23:51, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  verbal behavior is the extension of operant theory to humans. Why should we care about pigeons and rats if it doesn't generalize? --florkle 23:51, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  chomsky has been restored & extended. see article. --florkle 23:51, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  new sections 

message: There's been an interesting addition to the article in the form of a "further reading" section. It's an article that purports that cognition is a mediating influence on behavior under classical and operant conditioning procedures. Of course, the idea that cognition plays a role as a mediator of behavior goes against the radical behaviorist position that cognition is itself a form of behavior subject to the same laws as overt behavior, no more and no less. The authors go on to build a case (one that I don't consider convincing) using past research to support their assertion. For example, they claim that if behavior is affected by consequences, then it must be "goal-oriented" and that "expectancies" must be involved and that, therefore, this means cognition governs behavior. This is a clear example of invoking unseen causal agents. They also cite research on rat maze running whose results they interpret to mean that rats form "cognitive maps" instead of learned responses, such as the case in which a rat has learned to run a maze, then during a new trial when a path is blocked the rat uses a parallel path as an alternative, even though the rat has not learned to use that alternative parallel path. I think this does not exclude, to my satisfaction, the influence of the rat's past acquired history of navigational repertoires upon the behavior seen in the experiment. Another area the authors cite is a 1974 review by William Brewer which investigates the effects of informed consequences upon human behavior. These are cases in which neutral stimuli have acquired reinforcing or punishing functions upon a subject's behavior without any conditioning taking place. All of the Brewer (1974) examples, as far as I can see, can easily be explained by stimulus equivalence in which new stimulus functions can emerge through membership in an equivalence relation, which is a thoroughly behavior analytic area of research. Understandably, Brewer (1974) couldn't have known about stimulus equivalence as a behavioral explanation for the results he was seeing... but I think more should be expected of the present authors. It goes on to cite Rescorla (1988) which, for all intensive purposes, seems to be based upon a complete misrepresentation of the behavioral account of contingency. He claims that behaviorists view the degree of stimulus control exerted by a CS as determined by the number of CS>US pairings (which is not true of behaviorists) and goes on to state that he has "discovered" that the true relationship is the predictive value of the CS (which is what behaviorists already consider to be true). He states that behaviorists are therefore wrong (according to his understanding of behaviorism) and that there must therefore be some kind of "goal-directed" cognition going on to account for it.
I could really go on and on... and maybe I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, but I think this reference really doesn't belong here. I guess I could remove it without much fuss, but considering the level of misunderstanding of behavior analysis among cognitivists/constructivists I could easily see how simply removing it might elicit the reaction that I was removing fair criticism of behavior analysis. Maybe if we left the reference in the article, it could instead be a blue-print for elements of conditioning that could be further addressed in the body of the article itself? At the least it would be nice for others to review the reference themselves before having it removed. What do you think? Lunar Spectrum | Talk 04:13, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the reference should stay. Like you said, it could be a blueprint for other aspects of conditioning. I'm simply saying that because my psych professors strongly emphasize the role of congition in conditioning and learning.--Janarius 13:46, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

text: It gets a little tricky here. We can distinguish "cognition vs. operant conditioning" as well as "cognition vs. all-behavior-is-stimulus-response-learning". The cognitive map study with the three paths you mentioned was an experiment by Tolman, but he had a much simpler experiment that showd that rat behavior is not simply stimulus-response learning. One group of rats was allowed to run a maze with food reward at the end and the number of "errors" they made (wrong turns on the way to the food) were recorded on each day. Another group ran the maze but no food reward was given for a few days. When a food reward was finally introduced, the number of errors the rats made dropped right away. A stimulus-response explanation of the task would require that food reward information propagates backward through the maze, whereas the cognitive map hypothesis suggests that the rats formed a map in their head, so that as soon as the reward was available, spatial information they had already learned could be used to guide behavior. So I think we should keep in mind that even if you think cognition has nothing to do with operant conditioning, there is much evidence that cognition is involved in actual behavior which implies that stimulus-response learning is not the sole basis for all behavior. (See also Packard and McGaugh 1996, an inactivation study that showed a clear double dissociation between the two ways of guiding behavior). Summary: I'm neither opposing nor supporting that reference; just saying that this is an article on operant conditioning, not all animal behavior. digfarenough (talk) 14:26, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, the Tolman experiment you describe has the same problems I mentioned above about the effects of previous experience upon maze-running behavior. In the example you mentioned, the experiment assumes that the food reward is the only reinforcer experienced by the rat. The navigational responses of an actual rat in that kind of situation are going to be reinforced for proficiency by naturally occurring consequences if it is allowed to wander according to other motivations, like relieving stimulus deprivation. By comparison, the cognitive mapping model starts to look a lot more like a gray mystery box with the caption, "Something we don't understand happens here, then we see this result in performance. Let's give this mystery box a name and say that it explains the behavior." Also, regarding the Packard & McGaugh reference, the results look interesting, but I have to wonder if it has more to do with the inactivation of learning and cue-sensitivity instead of "place learning" vs. "response learning." From what I understand, current thinking on navigational behavior has been moving away from the cognitive maps model and is moving back in the direction of stimulus discrimination. I'm aware of a relatively recent review of research that also leans in that direction. Of course, that doesn't change the fact that cognitive explanations of behavior are the prevailing view in psychology, and should not be ignored as being part of the debate. It just doesn't sit right with me for it to sit there as if it didn't have the flaws I mentioned before. Then again, we're just talking about a "further reading" section. I orginally thought about adding citations for further reading that would balance out the section, but refutation by behaviorists specifically addressing the issues I've outlined has been difficult to find. Anything else I could put there would only serve to stray from the topic of operant conditioning, so I'm not inclined to do that. I'm resigned to having the article reference stay since at least I've had a chance to discuss my concerns about it here in the talk page. Lunar Spectrum | Talk 07:39, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I disagree about the Tolman experiment, but it might take a while to explain. My arguments would be heavily based on those given in the first chapter of Eichenbaum and Cohen's book. Briefly, the non-food-reinforced rats didn't decrease their escape latency until food was introduced, so knowledge of food was the only changed factor. "Cognitive map" isn't used a lot these days (that I've seen), as it is loaded by the work of O'Keefe and Nadel's famed book from the '70s, but the idea of cognition being important in navigation and behavior is increasingly common from what I've seen. (Give me a few months and maybe the third chapter in my thesis can convince you!:)). But I don't think cognition is a black box. I could give you a list of references that model this form of navigation as a graph search, either in hippocampus or (more correctly in my opinion) in neocortex. If anything, I think your approach to stimulus-response learning might be vague. If you take a particular model of operant conditioning, such as reinforcement learning, it gives a specific framework in which these ideas can be considered, and it becomes clear quickly that the Tolman results can't be explained (in that framework) as stimulus-response learning. Of course, Tolman was a long time ago and there are many other results since then. Anyhow, I must admit I'm more interested in discussing these ideas themselves than in deciding whether or not any given reference should go in the article. :) digfarenough (talk) 15:13, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: "Role of cognition" article

message: Hi - I kind of think parts of the article sound very defensive and somebody is getting rather uptight about the Skinner/Thorndike debate. I think credit is less important than making sure the point of the article is clear and explains what the current understanding of operant conditioning IS rather than making the article all messy about who made up what and so on. If I want to know who came up with what I don't think I'd come to Wikipedia to get that info. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.173.169.91 (talk) 21:17, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, I agree that the Thorndike section still sounds defensive. I think I will try to drop the parts where it sounds like the author is trying to refute a relationship between Skinner and Thorndike. Besides that, is there something else in the article you're saying sounds defensive? Lunar Spectrum | Talk 02:22, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: "Defensive" POV

message: I have never heard of this term unitl now and its only existence seems to be in Wiki-world forms.  I would not be in favor of a link to it on the Operant Condtioning Page.(Mcole13 (talk) 17:45, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: i agree with this. even if it is valid i expect it is yet to be studied appropriately anyway.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.151.0.40 (talk) 15:20, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

text: Agreed. 208.96.153.158 (talk) 14:26, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Mutual Operant Conditioning

message: I am interested in cases in which this has been used on humans for psychological treatment. Despite the effectiveness on pigeons and other less intelligent mammals I find it difficult to imagine with accuracy how operant conditioning could be used for aversion therapy. Links would be ideal.96.49.141.252 (talk) 06:06, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Real World Applications

message: The introduction is too technical and focuses mostly on describing what Operant conditioning is *not*, i.e. it is not classical conditioning, instead of on what it *is*. Could someone with the knowledge in the field write a better introduction and push the details clarifying the distinction with classical conditioning to the body of the article? --NavarroJ (talk) 18:09, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: In addition - it mischaracterizes classical conditioning using a very old and outdated understanding of classical conditioning.  See Rescorla 1988 - Classical Conditioning is not what you think it is. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.97.224.6 (talk) 12:45, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I definately agree. It is to list-like and to technical. It's a bit confusing... and has wrong information. Is there anyone with information in this field who can help fix this?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.99.105.225 (talk) 00:36, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Introduction is too technical

message: A colleague made a valuable correction, but followed it quickly with a mistaken edit that i've reverted.   The language they replaced --  "(commonly seen as pleasant)" and "(commonly seen as unpleasant) -- is deficient, but the reverted replacement was much worse, for breaking the desirable parallelism, for equating human attitudes to conditioning phenomena, and for ignoring the low correlation of unpleasantness to negative reinforcement (which parallels the low correlation of pleasantness to positive reinforcement). The problems this presents include:
# As Eysenck emphasizes in distinguishing reward from positive reinforcement and punishment from negative reinforcement, timing is a crucial element of the causal relationship.
# Virtually all species with nervous systems exhibit operant conditioning, including planaria and no doubt others so simple that attributing pleasure to them would logically require doing the same for extremely simple robots designed solely to make this point.
    The language i've restored can be improved upon, starting with taking this into account: 
: The only value of referring here to pleasantness and unpleasantness is to present the reader with the concept that some of the stimuli that will act as positive or negative reinforcers of their own behavior (or of behavior in others, whom they have heard label specific stimuli as pleasant or unpleasant) will correspond to stimuli that have received those labels; they are thus about human pleasure rather than the whole realm of operant conditioning. 
(In an article on the psychology of conditioning and learning, the whole notion of relevance of any(un-)pleasantness other than that in humans corrupts the unassailable status of experimental psychology as science, and drags in the irrelevant arguments like whether there is such a thing as "what it is like to be a bat".) And the revision i reverted was a step away from, rather than toward, what we need.--Jerzy•t 05:51, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Rewarding", "unpleasant" 

message: The section on immediacy doesn't have a citation, but here's a potential one. I don't know how to put it in myself but here's the link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037663570400169X JDWLB (talk) 13:06, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citation for Immediacy 

message: The article currently states that "instrumental learning was first extensively studied by Jerzy Konorski and next by Edward L. Thorndike." But Thorndike published his work on the law of effect in 1905, and Konorski wasn't even born until 1903. Something is amiss... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.42.228.249 (talk) 18:13, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Who discovered operant conditioning? 

message: At the top of the page, a figure of a tree structure of conditioning is presented. I identified a typing error. "Appetative" should be"Appetitive" See Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.Aartsj (talk) 07:55, 27 July 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Typing error 

message: This article seems all very theoretical and mostly focused on human behavior.  What I was trying to look up was a mention of "operant conditioning" as one of the things zoo interns/volunteers are trained in.  Google eventually told me that the conditioning is applied to the animals instead of the humans, to teach them to cooperate with routine health care, transfers between enclosures, and the like.  Perhaps a new section in the article is called for?  64.93.124.227 (talk) 03:18, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: That is a very good idea.  I can think of several examples: Hippos and elephants are given operant showers, pigs and cattle with electronic feeders, cattle with back scratching brushes.__DrChrissy (talk) 14:49, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Animal applications 

message: I added more information about the operant conditioning chamber to the part on Skinner. I included some of the initial tasks such as task 1, which is isolating an individual piece of behavior to see how it could be changed. I also mentioned how the variable ratio schedule plays into human gambling problems. I found this important to add while also very interesting. I am curious to learn more about the effects the variable ratio schedule in terms of human gambling.
Klaska 24 (talk) 05:54, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Operant Conditioning Chamber "Skinner Box" 

message: As people giving more intermittent reinforcement of reward or punishment, the pace of people changing their emotional bonds could be dramatically different. So really look out for the Traumatic bonding. I feel like this is a sensitive topic somehow but I want to come up with more examples based on it since there is nothing too much. Traumatic bonding could be applied onto a lot of cases.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Huskyqqq (talk • contribs) 04:48, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. This seems as if it can be detrimental to those affected. I think it can easily be linked to the chains that one develops when being stuck in a situation they can not break free from. It becomes all they know and can do serious damage. Justin.edwards (talk) 02:07, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Traumatic Bonding  

message: I added some things about the law of affect as it pertains to operant conditioning. I thought it could use an example without having to leave the page. I think it also ties into other sections so it fits well and keeps the wiki page smooth.
Justin.edwards (talk) 03:04, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Questions about the Law of Effect 

message: I added a paragraph to the 'Praise' section discussing studies done on the efficacy of Cognitive-Behavioral therapy and Operant-Behavioral therapy. It was touched on earlier in the section but I thought it would be good to elaborate on it. Klaska 24 (talk) 15:21, 12 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Praise 

message: According to the introduction operant conditioning is the same as contingency management but there is a separate article under that heading and presumably duplication of material. I suggest the two either be combined or the differences be clarified for the reader. I know nothing about the material so can’t work on it but a page I am editing on refers to both which brought me here to understand the difference. It’s just confused be more uNfortunately. Hopefully editors here will be able to sort it out. Dakinijones (talk) 23:09, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Operant conditioning is not "the same as contingency management"; I removed the relevant text from the lead. Thanks for pointing that out. Contingency management is an intentional application. Biogeographist (talk) 03:57, 16 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge With Contingency Management article? 

message: "In operant conditioning, stimuli present when a behavior that is rewarded or punished controls that behavior."
I cannot parse this sentence. What is the subject of 'controls'? Stimuli present? Then it should be 'control' not 'controls'. Why is there a 'that' after 'behavior'? I can't even tell what the sentence is trying to say. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.139.192.79 (talk) 07:20, 27 August 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: The sentence is grammatical, it's just hard to understand. The subject of that sentence is "stimuli present when a behavior that is rewarded or punished". I simplified that sentence for readability; I also undid some vandalism in the vicinity of that sentence that has gone unnoticed for weeks.--Megaman en m (talk) 09:55, 27 August 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sentence doesn't make sense and is not grammatical 

message: The tree at the top of the page does not fit appropriately on mobile. This includes  browser and app. Shaunlilan (talk) 05:43, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mobile experience 

message: Why no mention of ethical alternatives?  Of connections to Nazi practices? Of use by kiddy groomers?  Of coercion and battery? Of dehumanisation? Of autistic monolithic opposition to operant conditioning and ABA as unethical conversion 'therapy' delivered by an outright quack cult?
Oh, the cult runs this page?
Sorry, I will go now. 2407:7000:9C65:5E00:EC95:E3EA:83EF:1F8F (talk) 07:34, 26 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why no criticism section?