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Concept
Operant conditioning chamber
Summary
An operant conditioning chamber (also known as a Skinner box) is a laboratory apparatus used to study animal behavior. The operant conditioning chamber was created by B. F. Skinner while he was a graduate student at Harvard University. The chamber can be used to study both operant conditioning and classical conditioning.
Skinner created the operant conditioning chamber as a variation of the puzzle box originally created by Edward Thorndike. While Skinner's early studies were done using rats, he later moved on to study pigeons. The operant conditioning chamber may be used to observe or manipulate behaviour. An animal is placed in the box where it must learn to activate levers or respond to light or sound stimuli for reward. The reward may be food or the removal of noxious stimuli such as a loud alarm. The chamber is used to test specific hypotheses in a controlled setting.
Skinner was noted to have expressed his distaste of becoming an eponym. It is believed that Clark Hull and his Yale students coined the expression "Skinner box". Skinner stated he did not use the term himself, and went so far as to ask Howard Hunt to use "lever box" instead of "Skinner box" in a published document.
In 1898, American psychologist, Edward Thorndike proposed the 'law of effect', which formed the basis of operant conditioning. Thorndike conducted experiments to discover how cats learn new behaviors. His work involved monitoring cats as they attempted to escape from puzzle boxes. The puzzle box trapped the animals until they moved a lever or performed an action which triggered their release. Thorndike ran several trials and recorded the time it took for them to perform the actions necessary to escape. He discovered that the cats seemed to learn from a trial-and-error process rather than insightful inspections of their environment. The animals learned that their actions led to an effect, the type of effect influenced whether the behavior would be repeated. Thorndike's 'law of effect' contained the core elements of what would become known as operant conditioning.
Official source
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