Respondent Conditioning

1
Unit 2

• Respondent Conditioning

2
Inheritance

• All organisms inherit unconditioned reflexes
• Instinctive/released behavior
• E.g., nest building
• The capacity to be conditioned
• Respondent and operant
• Environmental effects to be understood first

3
Respondent Vs Operant

• Respondent conditioning
• Important to explain emotional responses
• Functional relations revealed
• Stimulus control
• Operant Psychology BAD NAME ?
• Respondent smooth muscles and glands
• Operant stripped muscles

4
Skinners work

• DV rate of responding
• Each participant exposed to all values of the IV
• Few subjects
• No significance tests
• No theory testing

5
Response Measures

• Response probability Rate
• Latency, reaction time, time to complete a task,
  number of errors, trials to criterion, etc.
• Frequency and rate better than probability

6
Theory

• Hypothetico deductive Vs Inductive
• Relations between dependent and independent
  variables (rate of reinforcement/rate of
  responses)
• See quote on JM p, 115
• Within subject Vs between subject
• Description Vs theory testing
• Visual inspection Vs significance tests

7
Behavior analysis

• is not only concerned with operant conditioning
• does not insist that behavior changes only
  because of exposure to contingencies
• acknowledges rule/instruction control
• not anti-physiological
• not anti-genetic
• not anti-theoretical
• is the science and technology of behavior

8
Group discussion

• Functional Vs Structural analyses
• What is topography?
• Object permanence stage of intellectual
  development (inferred states)
• How can you analyze this behavior functionally?

9
Terms

• Elicited, emitted, evoked
• Response class
• E.g., Lever press, call the waiter, etc
• Stimulus Class
• Stimulus Functions

10
Methods

• Dependent and Independent Variables
• Co-variation changes in IV are functionally
  related to changes in DV
• Changes in IV precede changes in DV
• Eliminate confounds

11
Reversal Design

• Baseline Criterion against which effects of IV
  will be assessed
• B IV manipulation repeated measure to assess
  behavioral change
• Reversal Repeated measures to rule out other
  explanations (control)
• Problems?

12
Internal Validity

• History conditions that change at the same time
  as the manipulation of the independent variable
• Maturation Biological/physiological processes
  that change over time
• Instrument Decay Problems with observers

13
External Validity

• Generalization
• Over time
• Place
• Dependent measures
• Similar manipulations
• As internal validity increases/external decreases

14
Replications

• Systematic Vs direct replications
• Direct additional participants
• Generalization assessed by replication not by
  large samples
• Behavior analysts are interested in predicting
  and controlling behavior of individual organisms
• Participant serves as its own control group