Studies and Experiments
Skinner Box Experiments
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A series of studies B.F. Skinner ran from the late 1920s at Harvard using an apparatus he built, later called the operant conditioning chamber or Skinner box. Rats or pigeons inside the chamber could press a lever or peck a key to receive a food pellet, and Skinner varied the schedule of reinforcement to see how it shaped the rate and persistence of the behavior. The work extended Thorndike's law of effect into a full account of operant conditioning, the idea that a behavior's consequences control how often it recurs.
Facts
Key FindingBehavior followed by a reinforcing consequence becomes more likely to recur, and the pattern of reinforcement (continuous versus intermittent, fixed versus variable) changes how fast the behavior is learned and how resistant it is to stopping once reinforcement ends. 1 Study Year1930 marks Skinner's graduate-student construction of the chamber at Harvard and its earliest use; the studies using it continued across the following decade, so this year is the apparatus's own introduction, not a single publication date. Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The chamber is the instrument through which operant conditioning was demonstrated and studied.
Conducted By
In Branch
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Operant conditioning
Wikimedia FoundationStructure sectionQuote, Structure section
Typical mechanisms for primates and rats are response levers; if the subject presses the lever, the opposite end closes a switch that is monitored by a computer or other programmed device.
2. Wikipedia: B. F. Skinner
Wikimedia FoundationScientific inventions, Operant conditioning chamber sectionQuote, Scientific inventions, Operant conditioning chamber section
It was invented by Skinner while he was a graduate student at Harvard University.
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