Classical Conditioning Vs Operant Conditioning

Learning is a change in an organism behavior or knowledge due to their experiences. Two well-supported theories in the psychological community are classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Ivan Pavlov, who discovered having a neutral stimulus presented with an unconditioned stimulus creates an unconditioned response leading to a controlled stimulus making a controlled response, developed classical conditioning. B.F Skinner another well-respected psychologist developed operant conditioning, which is when there is an event and a response and the response can be reinforced positively or negatively based on the situation. Classical conditioning is an involuntary response while operant conditioning is voluntary. Both of these theories are …show more content…
In this experiment, he conditioned stimulus is the sound of the food dispenser and the unconditioned stimulus was the food itself. In classical conditioning, the involuntary behavior is influenced. The desire for or hunger is an involuntary action. Therefore magazine training was a success because it followed a well-supported theory of classical conditioning. In addition, the findings did support the second hypothesis, which is Sniffy will learn to press the lever because of the shaping (reward food pellets) positive reinforcement. Another theory is operant conditioning, which is when there is an event and a stimulus is used to reinforce a particular action. In this experiment whenever Sniffy was climbing on the wall, or trying to press the lever the action was to dispense food. The reward of food was positive reinforcement for him to continue the behavior he was doing. However, the finding of the experiment did not support the hypothesis that Sniffy will learn quicker when the fixed ratio is smaller due to the theory of operant conditioning. The reasoning behind this hypothesis was the quicker he receives an award (food pellets) the more likely he would continue this action. In addition, there is no large …show more content…
Therefore, it is difficult to obtain strong evidence for learning since each student rat behaved differently. Also, the experimental group was fairly small only eleven participants this sample size was small to represent a population. A weakness in this experiment was only one student’s data was used to represent the whole population group of the class. Another weakness of the experiment was how committed the students were to teaching Sniffy. Participants could have not been paying attention to the screen or were distracted during good times they should have pressed the lever. Strengths of this experiment were each rat in the Sniffy program acted in a different manner. Therefore, it provided different data for each rat instead of a lot of data all from one specific rat behavior. In addition, the experiment was done on a computer therefore, it was very convenient. The software programs show the rate of progression in data making it easier and convenient to see learning being