Spend some time exploring various web sites that relate to what you have learned after completing the first homework for this week (H1). Write a detailed comment about the sites you visited and the material that we present there and how it relates to what you learned (or read) from H1. We should expect to see some time put into this and we should expect to see many of terms and terminology you learned so far in your comment.
Let me know if you have any questions,
--Dr. M
After reading the first chapters of each of these books, I would have to say superstitious behavior caught my eye the most. I, like most people, have some superstitious behaviors myself. I will move my mouse a certain way twice for my internet to open up. According to the text, behaviors such as these occur when an action is accidentally reinforced. Superstitions are born through temporal contiguity. Two unrelated events occur together, but in our minds, or to an animal, they are directly related. In order to be reinforced in the future we will produce the same behavior.
This was shown in work done by Skinner. He created the Skinner Box. An animal is placed in the box and receives food every five minutes. The dispense of food is not dependent upon the animal's behavior, however. Skinner found that if the animal happened to do a certain behavior just as the food was dispensed, they would continue to try that behavior until they were again reinforced. Because the food continued to arrive in intervals, the animals were still being "reinforced" by their superstitious behaviors.
Some of the sites I looked at tried to explain superstitios behaviors in other ways. For example, according to superstitions could be viewed as a way to relieve stress. This would be similar to obsessions for those with OCD. These behaviors have a calming effect. It can also give a person something to focus on. This may not have the same reasoning as the books did, but it still shows a level of reinforcement. By doing these behaviors, even though they are unrelated, they relieve negative emotions.
A third reason for such behaviors, is evolution. In my biopsychology class we were discussing traits that were carried on for survival. An example would be an animal's reaction to outside sounds. This is often unrelated to a predator, but by always reacting survival chances are increased. Here the reinforcement is safety, or at least the sense of being free from predators. There are many ways to look at superstitions and I find all of them to be interesting. Even when we realize that our behavior has no affect on the result we will ofen still keep the behavior. This is one example of what makes the mind such a challenge.
http://www.essortment.com/all/superstitiousbe_rsqz.htm
http://www.catalogs.com/info/history/common-superstitions.html
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=46749
Please ignore the last line of my post.
I have to say after reading the first chapter Positive Reinforcement is what interested me the most. I personally thing Positive Reinforcement can be more effective than punishment. I have tried positive reinforcement when training my dogs and in reaching some of my own goals. If I set a certian goal for myself and reach it I treat myself to something. I found a link to a handout that covers all of the information on positive reinforcement. I think it's a little easier to look over than just reading through the book. It even breaks the reinforcers down into categories. It also gives a check list and multiple examples of using the reinforcements. Fixed ratio vs. fixed interval is all explained as well.
This has a lot of the same basics as punishment just instead of punishing they are reinforcing. You still have to have the rules set out so the child or person knows what is expected. Then the timing has to be just right along with the ratios. Fixed or Fixed intervals. The parties involved also need to know the rules so there is consistency. Without consistency and timing the reinforcing will lose its effectiveness.
I also found a ton of youtube videos showing positive reinforcement in dog training and with children.
http://www.usu.edu/teachall/text/behavior/LRBIpdfs/Positive.pdf
The central theme of what I read about where the terms relating to the different kinds of punishments and rewards. I read about the difference in positive and negative punishment, and the difference in positive and negative reinforcement. I learned that if a behavior is not changed by an aversive event, punishment has not occurred. I also learned that a reinforcer cannot be called a reinforcer unless the behavior has increased.
From the positive reinforcement perspective, I learned about how rewards could be used to enhance intrinsic interests in activities. Some positive reinforcements could be such things as treats, smiles, claps, money, and other things given as a reinforcement for wanted behavior.
Negative reinforcement on the other hand, is defined by taking away something to increase a response. A few examples would be putting sunglasses on the take the sun out your eyes, or water boarding, which was done by the military. Negative aspects are taken out of someone’s environment that would increase that response.
On the other end of the spectrum, there is positive punishment. This is an aversive stimulus that a person is subjected to to get a response. An example is a mouth slap to get someone to be quiet when they are speaking out of line, or a dirty look when they are being ridiculous in public. These are both put in place to weaken the unwanted behavior.
Negative punishment is the less of the two evils, in which something is taken out of a person’s environment to be a punisher. It tends to be better because no one likes to be smacked in the face, or have a punishment inflicted. This, however, is effective as well. You may take away a wanted item from a person until they do the wanted behavior. This also may tie into the premack principle quite well. The premack principle involves pairing unwanted stimuli with wanted stimuli. For instance, a child’s two favorite activities are playing video games and riding a bike. You may want to pair these activities with their two least favorite activities such as taking out trash and cleaning their room. You tell them if they want to play video games, their room must be cleaned. If they want to ride their bike, the trash mush be taken out. If these things are paired, the unwanted activities do not seem so bad for the child. They will learn the consequences of their chores, and find that the rewards outweigh the work.
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/proj/nru/nr.html
http://www.psychology.uiowa.edu/Faculty/Wasserman/Glossary/reinforcement.html
http://allpsych.com/psychology101/reinforcement.html
http://www.petsalley.com/newsreinforcement.html
What facinated me the most when reading Ch1 of Don't Shoot the Dog was the training of dolphins. The website I found was created by seaworld. It states common questions among the curious.
What reinforcers do they use to train the dolphins at seaworld?
SeaWorld trainers use food as a primary reinforcer during the training process. Other reinforcing stimuli for marine mammals include touching, squirting them with a water hose, rubbing their bellies, giving them ice or floats to play with, etc.
What communication do they use?
Reinforcers are one way they communicate with the doplhins. As we know, the reinforcer lets the animal know when it has performed the desired behavior. It is important that an animal knows immediately when it performs the desired behavior. Any amount of delay may accidentally reinforce an undesired behavior. Since they cannot reinforce an animal while it is performing, they create a signal to tell them, "Yes, you have done the behavior we expected form you."
The signal converges the time lapse between the instant the animal performs the correct behavior and as soon as it is reinforced for the behavior. They refer to this as a "bridge signal," and it is a conditioned reinforcer. They state how they condition the bridge signal and how to train the dolphin to do a certain behavior.
I found it very interesting when I first found this out about 5 years ago when I last visited SeaWorld. The trainers have began using a new method of communication with marine mammals, based on computer-generated tones that are transmitted under water.
I have always been eager to train one of my 9 cats to sit or roll over, but simply haven't had the time to devote to it. But if you are interested, they have a section on training your pet! :)
http://www.seaworld.org/animal-info/info-books/training/train-your-pet.htm
http://www.wagntrain.com/OC/GetStarted.htm
http://www.robins-island.org/dolphins_training.php
http://www.seaworld.org/infobooks/training/atlearn.html
After reading chapter one of Don't Shoot the Dog, I found more information on negative reinforcement. While I understand the definition of negative reinforcement and how the definition is different from that of punishment, I still found it difficult to think of examples on my own as negative reinforcement as not described in great length in the chapter (nor in very many other resources.)
Positive reinforcement is easy to conceptualize and apply. When one uses positive reinforcement, they reward good behavior. Negative reinforcement has a reward as well, but the reward is harder to understand. As I read over examples of negative reinforcement I noticed many of them included the phrases "to get rid of", "to remove", or "to avoid." Thus, negative reinforcement is when one does an action to get rid of, remove, or avoid an aversive condition.
The more examples I read, the easier it became to understand. In negative reinforcement examples, the person being rewarded/reinforced is the person who does the action while in positive reinforcement examples the person being rewarded is most often the recipient of the action. The reward with negative reinforcement is the removal of the aversive condition one is trying to get rid of, remove, or avoid. The reward in positive reinforcement is something one wishes to receive rather than remove.
After searching for more examples, I feel more confident in my understanding of negative reinforcement and how it is similar to positive reinforcement as well as how it can increase a behavior.
Here are some of the examples and explanations I found:
www.princeton.edu/~yael/LearningCourse/Notes/Examples.doc
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/proj/nru/nr.html
http://www.psychology.uiowa.edu/Faculty/Wasserman/Glossary/reinforcement.html
http://www.psywww.com/intropsych/ch05_conditioning/negative_reinforcement.html
After reading about reinforcement from both books I found the topic of accidental reinforcement to be the most intriguing. Accidental reinforcement, which includes superstitious behavior, occurs all the time. The book gives the example about finding a twenty dollar bill by a trash basket and the tendency to continue to look each day at the same trash basket, hoping that coincidentally another twenty dollar bill will be there. If you think about it, how often does this occur to each and every one of us?? Thinking about my own experiences, I had a pencil last semester that I used for three tests in one week. I did very well on each test and, in my superstitious beliefs, felt that the pencil was lucky and continued to use that pencil for all tests throughout the semester. There was no reinforcement, just my own crazy beliefs but those beliefs were so strong.
When we train our pets we often don’t realize the accidental reinforcement that we give to our animals. My brother always says to his dog “are you ready to go” meaning that they are going back home. However, now when playing with her, if you tell her to “go find a toy” she hears the word “go” and runs for the door. He never meant to train her to associate the word “go” with running towards the door but, over time, she naturally assumed that was its meaning. Each time she ran for the door and he took her home he was accidentally reinforcing her behavior.
Accidental reinforcement is a powerful type of reinforcement. Though it is unintentional, it often has effects equal to the strength of positive and negative reinforcement. When we accidentally reinforce ourselves and develop superstitious beliefs, it is hard to let those beliefs go. If anybody ever played a sport I guaranteed they developed at least one (if not many) superstitious beliefs when it came to game time. You can tell yourself over and over again that the beliefs are dumb and have no real effect on your performance….but would you quit doing them? 99% of the time, I’m sure the answer is no. Only if they somehow changed to be “bad luck” would you choose to let them go.
http://vidallena.org/skinpal.htm
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-2902241/Characteristics-associated-with-superstitious-behavior.html
http://www.honoluluzoo.org/enrichment_operant_cond_terms.htm
As a person who works at a daycare and an elementary school I spend a lot of time working through the issuse of Negative and Positive reinforcement and negative and positive punishment. I am personally an advocate for positive reinforcement. I find it so interesting that you can alter someone (or something's) behavior by just reinforcing it. There are many ways to reinforce something if it is positive reinforcement than a stimulus of some kind imediately follows the desired behavior. Most of the time this is food but at daycare we try to be creative. Something that has worked really well for us is music the kids have a few favorite songs and if they follow instructions well as a group such as picking up quickly they the behavior is immediately followed with a song that they like and they can dance and sing until it is over and then they have to sit down to go on to the next thing. It is something they look forward to after doing a good job and it also burns some energy before nap time!
The link I have attatched is a clip from the tv show the big bang theory and it givbes a very funny example of positive reinforcement and what in my opinion is positive punishment but they call it negative reinforcement in the show.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA96Fba-WHk
After reading the textbook and the reader I found that reinforcement was one of the main focuses. I learned that negative reinforcement is something a person will work to avoid and can be halted by changing behavior. Positive reinforcement is something that increases a behavior and can be good for relationships.
http://www.psychology.uiowa.edu/Faculty/wasserman/Glossary/reinforcement.html
This website is a simple list of vocabulary words related to reinforcement including positive, negative, and conditioned reinforcement. I am familiar with all of the terms except ‘primary reinforcer.’ I don’t remember reading anything about this in either text. This site states that a primary reinforcer is anything that satisfies biological desires such as food, water, and sex. We basically couldn’t survive without these things. I’d like to learn more about primary reinforcers.
http://www.animalbehaviorassociates.com/pdf/RMN_punishment_negative_reinforcement.pdf
This website is an article published by the Rockey Mountain News on the difference between negative reinforcement and punishment. A lot of people can’t tell the difference. Personally, I often have this problem myself. This article uses the example of a dog with an electric fence surrounding a yard. Obviously, the purpose of the fence is to keep the dog in the yard. My textbook states that punishment is following an operant with a punisher. This can be seen when every time the dog crosses the wire it experiences a consequence, the electric shock. Through punishment, the dog eventually learns that to avoid pain it must stay in the yard. Negative reinforcement, on the other hand, is a behavior that is more likely to occur because a consequence is avoided or removed, or as Karen Pryor says in her book, something a person or animal will work to avoid. The dog will now run within the electric fence to avoid getting shocked. The authors of this article believe we need to be careful using punishment and negative reinforcement when training animals and encourage the use of positive reinforcement instead.
http://life.familyeducation.com/communication/behavior-modification/29734.html?page=1
This last website I found focuses on child reinforcement. It is a family education website that gives advice to parents on using positive reinforcement instead of negative reinforcement with their children. It stresses the importance of using positive communication to reinforce behavior. This might be difficult for parents especially after a long day of work but will help with family relationships and self-esteem. Karen Pryor says that positive reinforcement is something that increases behavior or something the subject wants. Acknowledging a child’s good behavior will encourage them to continue that behavior. Personally, I agree with all of this. I think parents should try their best to use positive reinforcement instead of punishment with their kids. It is something I will strive to do with my children and constant negativity from parents can have long-term psychological effects.