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Operant conditioning, also called instrumental conditioning, is a learning process where voluntary behaviors are modified by association with the addition of reward or aversive stimuli. The frequency or duration of the behavior may increase through reinforcement or decrease through punishment or extinction.
Radical behaviorism is a "philosophy of the science of behavior" developed by B. F. Skinner. It refers to the philosophy behind behavior analysis, and is to be distinguished from methodological behaviorism—which has an intense emphasis on observable behaviors—by its inclusion of thinking, feeling, and other private events in the analysis of human and animal psychology. The research in behavior analysis is called the experimental analysis of behavior and the application of the field is called applied behavior analysis (ABA), which was originally termed "behavior modification."
The experimental analysis of behavior is a science that studies the behavior of individuals across a variety of species. A key early scientist was B. F. Skinner who discovered operant behavior, reinforcers, secondary reinforcers, contingencies of reinforcement, stimulus control, shaping, intermittent schedules, discrimination, and generalization. A central method was the examination of functional relations between environment and behavior, as opposed to hypothetico-deductive learning theory that had grown up in the comparative psychology of the 1920–1950 period. Skinner's approach was characterized by observation of measurable behavior which could be predicted and controlled. It owed its early success to the effectiveness of Skinner's procedures of operant conditioning, both in the laboratory and in behavior therapy.
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understand the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental events. The cognitive revolution of the late 20th century largely replaced behaviorism as an explanatory theory with cognitive psychology, which unlike behaviorism examines internal mental states.
The N400 is a component of time-locked EEG signals known as event-related potentials (ERP). It is a negative-going deflection that peaks around 400 milliseconds post-stimulus onset, although it can extend from 250-500 ms, and is typically maximal over centro-parietal electrode sites. The N400 is part of the normal brain response to words and other meaningful stimuli, including visual and auditory words, sign language signs, pictures, faces, environmental sounds, and smells.
Prepulse inhibition (PPI) is a neurological phenomenon in which a weaker prestimulus (prepulse) inhibits the reaction of an organism to a subsequent strong reflex-eliciting stimulus (pulse), often using the startle reflex. The stimuli are usually acoustic, but tactile stimuli and light stimuli are also used. When prepulse inhibition is high, the corresponding one-time startle response is reduced.
The P300 (P3) wave is an event-related potential (ERP) component elicited in the process of decision making. It is considered to be an endogenous potential, as its occurrence links not to the physical attributes of a stimulus, but to a person's reaction to it. More specifically, the P300 is thought to reflect processes involved in stimulus evaluation or categorization.
The mismatch negativity (MMN) or mismatch field (MMF) is a component of the event-related potential (ERP) to an odd stimulus in a sequence of stimuli. It arises from electrical activity in the brain and is studied within the field of cognitive neuroscience and psychology. It can occur in any sensory system, but has most frequently been studied for hearing and for vision, in which case it is abbreviated to vMMN. The (v)MMN occurs after an infrequent change in a repetitive sequence of stimuli For example, a rare deviant (d) stimulus can be interspersed among a series of frequent standard (s) stimuli. In hearing, a deviant sound can differ from the standards in one or more perceptual features such as pitch, duration, loudness, or location. The MMN can be elicited regardless of whether someone is paying attention to the sequence. During auditory sequences, a person can be reading or watching a silent subtitled movie, yet still show a clear MMN. In the case of visual stimuli, the MMN occurs after an infrequent change in a repetitive sequence of images.
William Kaye Estes was an American psychologist. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Estes as the 77th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. In order to develop a statistical explanation for the learning phenomena, William Kaye Estes developed the Stimulus Sampling Theory in 1950 which suggested that a stimulus-response association is learned on a single trial; however, the learning process is continuous and consists of the accumulation of distinct stimulus-response pairings.
The name-letter effect is the tendency of people to prefer the letters in their name over other letters in the alphabet. Whether subjects are asked to rank all letters of the alphabet, rate each of the letters, choose the letter they prefer out of a set of two, or pick a small set of letters they most prefer, on average people consistently like the letters in their own name the most. Crucially, subjects are not aware that they are choosing letters from their name.
In cognitive psychology, the Eriksen flanker task is a set of response inhibition tests used to assess the ability to suppress responses that are inappropriate in a particular context. The target is flanked by non-target stimuli which correspond either to the same directional response as the target, to the opposite response, or to neither. The task is named for American psychologists Barbara. A. Eriksen & Charles W. Eriksen, who first published the task in 1974, and for the flanker stimuli that surround the target. In the tests, a directional response is assigned to a central target stimulus. Various forms of the task are used to measure information processing and selective attention.
In neuroscience, the N100 or N1 is a large, negative-going evoked potential measured by electroencephalography ; it peaks in adults between 80 and 120 milliseconds after the onset of a stimulus, and is distributed mostly over the fronto-central region of the scalp. It is elicited by any unpredictable stimulus in the absence of task demands. It is often referred to with the following P200 evoked potential as the "N100-P200" or "N1-P2" complex. While most research focuses on auditory stimuli, the N100 also occurs for visual, olfactory, heat, pain, balance, respiration blocking, and somatosensory stimuli.
Error-related negativity (ERN), sometimes referred to as the Ne, is a component of an event-related potential (ERP). ERPs are electrical activity in the brain as measured through electroencephalography (EEG) and time-locked to an external event or a response. A robust ERN component is observed after errors are committed during various choice tasks, even when the participant is not explicitly aware of making the error; however, in the case of unconscious errors the ERN is reduced. An ERN is also observed when non-human primates commit errors.
The P3b is a subcomponent of the P300, an event-related potential (ERP) component that can be observed in human scalp recordings of brain electrical activity. The P3b is a positive-going amplitude peaking at around 300 ms, though the peak will vary in latency from 250 to 500 ms or later depending upon the task and on the individual subject response. Amplitudes are typically highest on the scalp over parietal brain areas.
The oddball paradigm is an experimental design used within psychology research. Presentations of sequences of repetitive stimuli are infrequently interrupted by a deviant stimulus. The reaction of the participant to this "oddball" stimulus is recorded.
Implicit egotism is the hypothesis that humans have an unconscious preference for things they associate with themselves. In a 2002 paper, psychologists Pelham, Mirenberg, and Jones argue that people have a basic desire to feel good about themselves and behave according to that desire. These automatic positive associations would influence feelings about almost anything associated with the self. Based on the mere ownership effect, which states that people like things more if they own them, and the name-letter effect, which states that people like the letters of their name more than other letters, the authors theorised that people would develop an affection for objects and concepts that are chronically associated with the self, such as their name. They called this putative form of unconscious attraction 'implicit egotism'.
Jozef Nuttin (1933–2014) was a Belgian psychologist who discovered the name-letter effect, the strong preference people have for letters in their own name. The idea for the psychological experiment to assess if there is an effect came to him in around 1978 when he noticed he liked car license plates that contained letters of his name. He was a scientist working for the Laboratorium for Experimental Psychology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, a lab he had founded in 1963. In 1985 he published his name-letter research. He and others have since found the effect independent of language. After a few years of relative obscurity, this effect is now used in psychological tests as a measure of implicit self-esteem. Nuttin died in 2014.
Roland Clark Davis was an American psychologist recognized for his innovation in instrumentation and measurement of electrophysiological phenomena. Davis contributed to the measurement of electrodermal activity, gastric reflexes, and muscle action potentials. Davis published over 70 articles on psychophysiology and related topics across a 30-year career and mentored many graduate students at Indiana University Bloomington from 1931 through 1961.
Eugene Nikolayevich Sokolov, also known as Evgeny Nikolaevich Sokolow, Evgeny Nikolaevich Sokolov, Evgeni Sokolov, Ye. N. Sokolov, Evgeniĭ Sokolov, Yevgeny Nikolaevich Sokolov, and Yevgeniy Nikolaevich Sokolov, was a Russian researcher specialized in the field of neuroscience who worked at Moscow State University and founded the Soviet psychophysiology research. He is best known for his work on the orienting reflex and habituation. He authored Orienting Response Information on this subject.
Arne Öhman was a Swedish psychologist who served as professor of psychology at the Karolinska Institutet from 1993 to 2010, where he was the head of the Department of Clinical Neuroscience from 2001 to 2004. He previously served as a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Uppsala from 1982 to 1993. He was noted for his research in the fields of experimental psychology and psychophysiology, and on the psychology of emotion. He was president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research from 1984 to 1985, and received its award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychophysiology in 2001. He was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 2005 to 2006. He was named a member of the Academia Europaea in 1992 and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1998. He was an elected member of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute from 1997 to 2010, as well as a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.
References
Notes
Sources
- Salkind, Neil J. (2012). Encyclopedia of Research Design. ISBN 9781412961271.
- Department of psychological and brain sciences, University of Iowa. "Yoked control".
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- Nuttin, Jozef M. Jr. (1985). "Narcissism beyond Gestalt and awareness: the name letter effect". European Journal of Social Psychology. 15 (3): 353–361. doi:10.1002/ejsp.2420150309.
- Engel, Bernard T.; Chism, Ray A. (1967). "Operant conditioning of heart rate speeding". Psychophysiology. 3 (4): 418–426doi=10.1111/j.1469–8986.1967.tb02728.x. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8986.1967.tb02728.x. PMID 6041674.