Operant Conditioning – Shaping and Extinction

Need help preparing for the Psych/Soc section of the MCAT? MedSchoolCoach expert, Ken Tao, will teach everything you need to know about Operant Conditioning and Shaping and Extinction for Associative Learning. Watch this video to get all the MCAT study tips you need to do well on the psychology section of the exam! Examples of operant conditioning often deal with rodents pressing levers. However, in nature, rodents normally don't ever encounter levers. How exactly are we able to train rodents to participate in lever pressing? Similar to learning a complicated dance, you’re not going to teach an animal to perform a complex behavior all at once, but by breaking down the behavior into smaller pieces. Shaping is the process of guiding an organism to perform a complex behavior through many successive trials by reinforcing exact segments of the behavior. Let’s say you want to train a rodent to press a lever, so you place it into a container with a lever in one part of the cage. At first, the rodent will explore the cage randomly. The first step in training it to press a lever would be to reward it whenever the rodent turns to face the lever. After multiple applications of this positive stimulus, the frequency with which they decide to perform this behavior will increase. Next, we would halt rewards for performing this segment of the behavior. Instead, we will now reward the rodent whenever he faces the lever and moves toward the lever, until the rodent increases the frequency with which they perform this behavior. Lastly, we will reward the rodent only when it faces the lever, moves toward the lever, and touches the lever. When this behavior is reinforced, we will only add the reward when the rodent faces the lever, approaches the lever, touches it, and physically moves the lever. Therefore, over successive trials, we will have taught the rodent segments of the complex behavior, which are combined into the more complex behavior over time. Extinction The extinction of a behavior occurs when a behavior is no longer associated with a reward or a punishment. In the case of lever pressing, if a rodent learned to press a lever for a food reward, withholding food whenever the rodent presses the lever would eventually lead to a reduction in the frequency with which the rodent presses the lever. Extinction of operantly conditioned behavior is similar to the extinction of classically conditioned behavior, because in both cases a lack of occurrence of a stimulus will be recognized by the animal. MEDSCHOOLCOACH To watch more MCAT video tutorials like this and have access to study scheduling, progress tracking, flashcard and question bank, download MCAT Prep by MedSchoolCoach IOS Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.htd.medschoolcoach&hl=en_US Apple Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mcat-prep-by-medschoolcoach/id1503000883 #medschoolcoach #MCATprep #MCATstudytools