Operant Conditioning: Virtual Skinner Box - Essay Example

Operant Conditioning: Virtual Skinner BoxOperant Conditioning is a way of learning by the response of people as a result of positive or negative measures. The organism will react accordingly to the environment it will be provided with, to produce the desirable results. We see in our daily life what working hard brings us better grades and cleaning our room will get us word of praise from our parents. So all these things affect how we behave and what results we achieve in tasks assigned to us.

The virtual Skinner box is part of the very first experiments regarding operant conditioning conducted by B.F. Skinner (Howard, 7). This animation shows a box which holds a very highly controlled environment to study the different animals. Here we are provided with a virtual box, which holds two buttons (green and red), a food tray, a speaker and a light. Green button when pressed brings us reward (candy), which will pop up in the food tray, while light will also blink with pressing the green button.

While red button when pressed will produce a loud sound on the speaker as punishment.(Kscience, n.p.)Let’s suppose it’s a cat in the box, what we want here is to teach this hungry cat to press the green button to get reward or reinforcement. At first the cat may just wonder in the box, trying to explore what’s around. There may come an occasion when the cat will probably press the green button and receive a food (candy) as reward. The very first time this will happen the cat will not learn the connection between the button and the food, so the cat will continue with exploration of the environment.

After repeating this practice the cat will eventually satisfy its hunger and get to know that its actually pressing the green button by which it is getting the food, which demonstrates that cat has learned that to get the food is dependent of button pressing behavior. As pressing the red button cause loud sound which will be disturbing for the cat so she will learn to avoid pressing the red button at all. As the concept of operant conditioning is basically based on the concept of E.L. Thorndike (Baucum, 4)i.e., we learn through trail error, as in the above experiment we saw that cat in the beginning often presses the red button and has to encounter loud and cunning sound but after some trails cat realized and that the right way to get food is by pressing green button.B.F.

Skinner’s operant conditioning has become a very influential area of psychology because it has successfully provided solutions to the problems in the life of human beings as well. Trail and error concept is very much applicable on human beings as similar to animals. Skinner’s box is widely used now days by psychologists for solving certain problems of humans and animals regarding learning adjustment. ReferencesBaucum, Don. Psychology. Hauppauge, N.Y: Barron's, 2006. Print.Howard, Robert W.

 Learning and Memory: Major Ideas, Principles, Issues, and Applications. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1995. Print.Kscience. Skinner Box. 2006. Internet Resource