Ch. 1 The Science of Psychology Redefining Psychology: The Study of Behavior

John B. Watson: Behaviorism 1857-1958 Behaviorism: Def.- School of Psychology that studies only observable and measurable behavior.

John B. Watson Consider the emphasis on the Natural Science Method Thought that all human behavior is a result of conditioning or a result of past experiences and environmental influences. Claimed he could take any child and train him to become any type of specialist.

Ivan Pavlov: 1849-1936 -Russian Physiologist He had become interested in the relationship between salivation and the digestive process.

Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Pavlov In order to explicitly validate his observations he began to feed his dogs in association with the ringing of a bell. After a certain time the dogs were shown to salivate profusely in association with the ringing bell where the actual sight or smell of food was not also present.

Ivan Pavlov Pavlov regarded this salivation as being a conditioned reflex and designated the process by which the dogs had picked up this reflex classical conditioning. Conclusion: All behavior is a response to a stimulus or agent in the environment.

Conditioning: Def.- The acquiring of fairly specific patterns of behavior in the presence of well defined stimuli.

Ivan Pavlov

John B. Watson Watson came to believe that all mental experience (thinking, feeling, awareness of changes in response) were accumulated experiences of conditioning.

John B. Watson "Psychology as the behaviorist views it," Watson wrote, "is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent on the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness."

John B. Watson His most famous experiment was conducted in the winter of 1919 and 1920 with a baby known as Albert B.

John B. Watson In fact, any furry item -- a stuffed toy, a fur coat, even a Santa Claus mask -- made Albert cry and be afraid.

John B. Watson

B.F. Skinner: Behaviorism Revisited Fun Facts: - B.A. in English – worked with authors Carl Sandburg & Robert Frost -Wrote 2 famous books- “Beyond Freedom & Dignity” and “Walden Two”

B.F. Skinner Primary interest? - changing behavior through conditioning and discovering natural laws of behavior in the process. Reinforcement: Def.- Anything that follows a response and makes that response more likely to recur.

B.F. Skinner Skinner recognized the critical importance of constancy of conditions in his experiments and developed the Operant Conditioning chamber or “Skinner Box.”

The Skinner Box The animal’s presses on the levers can be detected and recorded and a contingency between these presses, the state of the stimulus lights and the delivery of reinforcement can be set up, all automatically.

Operant Chamber The Operant chamber, or Skinner box, comes with a bar or key that an animal manipulates to obtain a reinforcer like food or water. The bar or key is connected to devices that record the animal’s response.

Operant Conditioning The procedure in which behavior is strengthened through reinforcement The delivery of the reinforcer is contingent on the subjects behavior Classical Conditioning—Behavior is elicited Operant Conditioning—Behavior is emitted

B.F. Skinner Skinner’s early experiments produced pigeons that could dance, do figure eights, and play ping-pong. “Too many people think of me as the person who taught pigeons to play Ping-Pong. It turns up in the damnedest places! I did that for a classroom demonstration to prove what you could do with these techniques, to show people the product of shaping behavior. I didn’t do it to teach the pigeons to play Ping-Pong. That’s not the science!” Then he added, with comic timing, “Although the pigeons did get pretty good at it…angle shots and so on.”

B.F. Skinner- Research for the War Effort During World War II, Skinner conducted a series of experiments in which he trained sets of pigeons to navigate bombs dropped from aircraft so they would hit their targets accurately. The pigeons were to be harnessed inside the nose cones of the bombs. The pigeons were trained with slides of aerial photographs of the target, and if they kept the crosshairs on the target, they were rewarded by a grain deposited in a tray in front of them.

B.F. Skinner Contributions? - Benefits to Education -Behavior Modification techniques -Animal Training procedures.