Exam 5: Section 1: Learning

Correct Answer:

Verified

The answer should include the following information: In positive reinforcement, an operant behavior is strengthened because it has been followed by a reinforcing stimulus. The textbook gives several examples. In sales, if a person achieves a particular sales quota (the operant), they receive a bonus check (the reinforcing stimulus). Another example is that a child is told to clean up their room (the operant) and they receive an ice cream (the reinforcing stimulus). In these examples, the addition of the reinforcing stimulus has an effect of making the person more likely to repeat the operant in similar situations in the future, we say that positive reinforcement has occurred. However, what is considered a reinforcing stimulus can vary from person to person, species to species, and situation to situation. On the other hand, negative reinforcement involves an operant behavior that is followed by the removal of an aversive stimulus. In this case, a response increases because it produces a change that is positive. For example, a child is crying, and the parent changes her diaper. Your roommate is playing loud music, and you put ear plugs in. In these cases, an aversive stimuli, some physical or psychological discomfort is present and the person would like to escape or avoid these circumstances. Behavior is negatively reinforced when they let the person escape the aversive stimulus that presents or completely avoid it before it occurs.

Correct Answer:

Verified

The answer should include the following information: Instinctive drift refers to the tendency of an animal to revert to instinctive behaviors that may interfere with a conditioned response. The concept originated with B.F. Skinner's students Keller Breland and Marian Breland. The Brelands noted that animals engaged in these nonreinforced, instinctive behaviors such that chicken chased balls much like they would if they were chasing an insect. Raccoons instinctively dip their food in water and rub it between their paws or put the food on the ground and turn it over with their paws. The Brelands found that this biological predisposition to perform these instinctual behaviors could interfere with learned behaviors they were trying to condition that would result in reinforcement.

Correct Answer:

Verified

The answer should include the following information: Human phobias tend to be related to things like snakes, spiders, excessive heights, and small enclosed places. This association suggests that humans are biologically prepared to develop fears of objects or situations that involve snakes, spiders, heights, etc. since they may have once posed a threat to our ancestors' survival. Humans appear to be particularly prepared to detect and make conditioned fear responses to snakes and spiders. Researchers have suggested that a "fear module" may have developed in the brain that is highly sensitized to evolutionarily relevant stimuli like snakes and spiders. People that were prepared to rapidly identify and avoid such organisms were more likely to survive, reproduce, and pass on that knowledge and their genes to subsequent generations.