Behavior
The Partial Reinforcement Effect - By Mitchell Yoka
Partial Reinforcement
Partial reinforcement occurs when reinforcement will only occur sometimes or periodically, not all the time. An example of this would be like catching a football. you'll sometimes catch it and feel good about it, so you'll keep doing it. But if you aren't doing well, you'll give yourself motivation to keep going, but eventually, if you still don't do well, you'll give up, leading to extinction, stopping a behavior because it is no longer being reinforced.
The Schedules of Reinforcement
There are four different types of schedules, each having different patterns and rates of responding.
- Fixed-Ratio (FR): Reinforcement occurs after a fixed number of responses.
- Variable-Ratio (VR): Reinforcement occurs after an average number of responses.
- Fixed-Interval (FI): Reinforcement occurs when the first response occurs after a preset time interval has passed.
- Variable-Interval (VI): Reinforcement occurs when the first response occurs after an average amount of time has passed.
Some Examples Include:
Babysitting
Fixed-Interval: You work hourly and get the same amount each hour, no matter how much you do.
Fishing
Variable-Interval: You are likely to catch the same number of fish in a given time period on average, but you do knot know when this will occur in the time you spend.
Fruit Picking
Fixed-Ratio: the amount of fruits you pick determines how much you are payed. The quality of the fruit doesn't matter, the quantity picked matters in this schedule.
Gambling
Variable-Ratio: The average win ratio of a slot machine could be 10 to 1, but that doesn't necessarily guarantee you will likely win on every 10th try.
Try it out! Discover various examples for yourself! It's not that hard!
Who Discovered Partial Reinforcement?
It was none other than B. F. Skinner. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1904 and after he had gotten his doctorate from Harvard he began to study human behavior. He had created the Skinner box, which allowed him and others to study how the animal reacts to it's environment, usually rats or pigeons. Rats usually had a bar to press on, while pigeons usually pecked a disk. One day, while studying some rats behavior in a Skinner box, he was running low on food pellets and, rather than reinforcing every bar press, he instead tried spacing his rewards periodically to each response. He found out that this actually increased the rate of bar pressing.
Works Cited
- Hockenbury, D., & Hockenbury, S. (2001). Chapter 5 Learning. In Discovering psychology (6th ed., pp. 209-212). New York: Worth.
B.F. Skinner Biography. (n.d.). Retrieved October 11, 2015, from http://www.biography.com/people/bf-skinner-9485671