Yogurt Experiment

When I was in 11th grade, I used to babysit a toddler who had several developmental delays in her learning therefore, during the hours I spent with her, it was my job to help her learn simple tasks such as using a toilet or eating her yogurt properly. I didn’t know that what I was doing was backward chaining, but it was. In the instance of teaching Ava to open and eat her yogurt properly, the yogurt served as a primary reinforcer, the spoon served as a secondary reinforcer, as it allowed her to become closer to the primary reinforcer) and also as a discriminative stimulus for the next response of putting yogurt on the spoon, and the act of the top being peeled off served as a discriminative stimulus for the next response of picking up the spoon, …show more content…
The dependent variable was the amount of wrong turns each rat made which was hypothesized to depend on how many trials the rats got with or without food. In this experiment, three groups of rats were put in a maze. Group 1 was given no food when they reached the end. Group two was given food every time they reached the end, and group three was only given food when they reached the end for the last seven of the seventeen trials. Group one made many errors; group two made, on average, three errors; and group three made many errors until they were presented with the reinforcement. When this happened, even though they generally made many errors, this group began to excel their performance past even that of group two. This phenomenon has been used to reveal the differential contribution of reinforcement in influencing learning versus performance. These rats in group three obviously learned (latently) where the correct turns were, but had to motivation to make them. However, when a reinforcer was added, they had an incentive to actually perform what they had already …show more content…
While this is not perfectly inelastic, it comes close because almost everyone nowadays needs electricity. While there are several electricity companies, many people around here use Dominion. If Dominion were to hike their prices, most people would still have a high demand for electricity. Even if all electricity companies would hike their prices, the demand would still remain high. Again this example is not perfect, but electricity is much more elastic than any type of chip or soda. A second example of inelastic demand is healthcare. All people need healthcare and there will always be a high demand for it. Even if it becomes outrageously expensive, people will still need it. There are no other alternatives to healthcare and therefore this service is a very inelastic