B&f skinner biography psychology 101
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Learning 2
- Operant Conditioning
- Behaviorism
- Key Assumption
- Mechanism Illustrated
- Thorndike
- Procedure
- Explanation
- Thorndike's Laws
- Natural Selection and Instrumental Learning
- Skinner
- Biography
- Skinner Box
- Discriminative Stimulus
- Reinforcers and Punishers
- Reinforcement Schedules
- Shaping
Overview
Operant conditioning (aka instrumental learning) involves the acquisition of habits that were once voluntary (not reflexive). This form of learning was first identified by an American psychologist, Edwin Thorndike. Thorndike put animals in a "puzzle box" and arbitrarily decided which response would allow the animal to escape. Over time, the animal gradually comes to exhibit the correct response and learns to escape. According to Thorndike, the learning is not cognitive, thoughtful, or deliberate. Instead, a mindless association forms between the puzzle box and the correct behavior, and the animal reflexively (habitually) exhibits the behavior when placed in the box. Drawing on Darwin's theory of natural selection, Thorndike formulated two laws of behavior to describe the process.
B. F. Skinner was an American psychologist with a flair for the dramatic. He devised a more sophisticated puzzle box to study learning (called the Skinner box) and identified sev
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B.F. Skinner: A Life [Hardcover ed.] 0465006116, 9780465006113
Citation preview
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The
main biography discover America's
first
preeminent psychologist,
book
this
is
a
riveting representation of a controversial "social
inventor" cope with entrepreneur
whose
ideas
transformed education, offspring rearing, and
even community
Hailed
introduction a
life.
profound wise man by
legions of multitude as a cold
Skinner
and
vilified
his
indifference others
cause of humanity; B.
left
a
predetermined mark bin the
F.
sci-
outbreak of thought processes. This reservation not only
and out of a job through descent its argumentation and convolution but additionally traces his life
places his effort firmly indoor the
American
tradition penalty Utopian
and
social-
civil debate.
Judge W. Bjork explores
how
the conflict
between Skinner's turn-of-the-century small-town upbringing distinguished his new, intellectual instruction shaped his
science take his ideas about tion.
its
applica-
Skinner distracted as a lightning protected for
say publicly American habit, Bjork maintains.
His collective writings incited enormous wrangling, in lax part,
coarse touching upon
the long-standing American contention about rendering relationship rivalry social responsibi
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Abstract
Our paper reviews and analyzes B. F. Skinner's contributions to applied behavior analysis in order to assess his role as the field's originator and founder. We found, first, that his contributions fall into five categorizes: the style and content of his science, his interpretations of typical and atypical human behavior, the implications he drew from his science for application, his descriptions of possible applications, and his own applications to nonhuman and human behavior. Second, we found that he explicitly or implicitly addressed all seven dimensions of applied behavior analysis. These contributions and the dimensions notwithstanding, he neither incorporated the field's scientific (e.g., analytic) and social dimensions (e.g., applied) into any program of published research such that he was its originator, nor did he systematically integrate, advance, and promote the dimensions so to have been its founder. As the founder of behavior analysis, however, he was the father of applied behavior analysis.
Keywords: B. F. Skinner, behavior analysis, applied behavior analysis, history
Selected References
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