How Reinforcement Is Used to Modify Behavior

Using reinforcement to modify behavior is an important technique for modifying behavior in children, adults and animals. It can be used for a variety of reasons and is often helpful when working with students who have difficulty learning new skills.

Reinforcement is defined as the increase in the probability of a specific response after a certain stimulus is administered. It is an extremely common term in behavioral psychology and is a basic component of most educational, special education and applied behavior analysis methods.

There are several types of reinforcers that can be used to modify behavior, including positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. They are all aimed at changing the probability of a behavior occurring in the future and can be both natural and artificial.

Positive reinforcement occurs when a reward is presented to the person after they perform a behavior, making it more likely that the behavior will occur in the future. This can be done through rewarding a person with something they like such as food or toys.

Another type of reinforcement is positive conditioning, which can be used to change a person's attitude towards a certain situation or activity. This can be done through praising the person or providing them with something positive, such as a new toy or a movie ticket after they complete a task.

This can be used to make a person more willing to do a particular activity, for example, if they receive praise and a movie ticket after finishing their homework.

It can also be used to reduce the frequency of a problem behavior, such as a child who throws a tantrum every time they are not able to complete their work. This can be done through reducing the amount of time that a person spends on the activity or by removing the aversive condition from their environment.

A common type of reinforcement schedule is one that varies the amount of time between reinforcers. This can be referred to as a rate of reinforcement and is often based on the age and ability level of the learner, as well as the specific behavior that needs to be reinforced.

The rate of reinforcement is usually measured through the number of minutes or hours that pass between reinforcers. Younger learners or those learning new skills may require more frequent reinforcements to speed up their progress and ensure that they are not bored during training.

There are many different types of reinforcement schedules, and some are more suited to certain types of behaviors than others. Some of these are fixed ratio schedules, which deliver the reinforcer only after a certain number of responses; interval schedules, which delivery the reinforcement after a specified amount of time has passed since the last reinforcer; and variable-ratio schedules, which vary the timing of the reinforcer.

There are also superimposed schedules of reinforcement that involve a number of simple schedules operating simultaneously to create or simulate different situations. They can be very effective in generating social traps.