Operant Conditioning: A Case Study

The subject I experimented on was my mother’s new schnauzer puppy, her name is Josie. Negative reinforcement, positive reinforcement, negative punishment, and positive punishment are the different types of operant conditioning. Out of the four different types of operant conditioning techniques the one I chose that would work the best is positive reinforcement. The reason why I chose the technique of positive reinforcement is because Josie is a very timid puppy towards people other than my mom. So my experiment was to intrigue her with a dog treat to approach me and become comfortable with my presence. This will benefit for the bond between me and Josie in the future when I visit my mother’s house. Hopefully by the end of experimenting (training) she won’t be so timid to approach me when I walk through the door and will be excited to see me. Positive reinforcement is stated as “it involves the addition of a reinforcing stimulus following a behavior that makes it more likely that the behavior will occur again in the future” (What You Should Know About Positive Reinforcement, Web). When a reward is given after an action is made …show more content…
Classical conditioning is a learning technique when two stimuli are directly paired together to react with each other. An example of classical conditioning is the first time you hear the song from the ice cream truck as a young child it means almost nothing, but having the thought of ice cream makes you crave it and as time progresses along hearing the song makes your mouth water and cravings to increase. The unconditioned stimulus is the thought of having ice cream. Unconditioned response is the craving of having ice cream. The conditioned stimulus is when you hear the song from the ice cream truck. Conditioned response is what happens when thinking about ice cream it makes your mouth