B. F. Skinner is the most eminent psychologist of the twentieth century, and it is no exaggeration to say that his discovery of operant learning (conditioning) has influenced the broader field of psychology, as well as other disciplines, including education, neuroscience, and philosophy. Skinner's discovery and elucidation of operant learning has…

To benefit from the exploration of their bodies and their physical and social environments, infants need to detect sensorimotor contingencies linking their actions to sensory feedback. This ability, which seems to be present in babies from birth and even in utero, has been widely used by researchers in their study of early development. However, a…

Hippocampal-dependent tasks often involve specific associations among stimuli (including egocentric information), and such tasks are therefore prone to interference from irrelevant task strategies before a correct strategy is found. Using an object-place paired-associate task, we investigated changes in neural firing patterns in the hippocampus in…

This book contains a compilation of papers presented at the International Psychological Applications Conference and Trends (InPACT) 2018, organized by the World Institute for Advanced Research and Science (W.I.A.R.S.). Modern psychology offers a large range of scientific fields where it can be applied. The goal of understanding individuals and…

A time window is a limited period after an event initially occurs in which additional information can be integrated with the memory of that event. It shuts when the memory is forgotten. The time window hypothesis holds that the impact of a manipulation at different points within the time window is nonuniform. In two operant conditioning…

Results obtained from 27 infants ranging in age from 10 to 12 weeks indicated that infants develop expectancies regarding how stimuli occurring in particular contexts should behave based on their prior experiences with these stimuli. (Author/RH)

Results of an experiment with 6-month-old infants showed that response-independent auditory-visual reinforcement can elicit learned responses and that action-consequence learning in infants may consist of a combination of elicitation and conditioning. (Author/JMB)

A total of 30 infants with an average age of 83.4 days were trained for one l8-minute, two nine-minute, or three six-minute sessions separated by 24-hour intervals in order to investigate long-term retention of operant foot kicking acquired in the mobile conjugative reinforcement paradigm. (Author/CI)

An operant conditioning discrimination paradigm was evaluated of relationships between response behavior of young children and two stimulus components of the paradigm, the discriminative stimulus and the reinforcing stimulus. Findings revealed the effects of schedules of reinforcement, novel reinforcement, and age. (Author/CL)

An operant conditioning technique was used to study visual discrimination of simple patterns by infants aged 6-12 weeks. The appropriate direction of head turning to the patterns was developed and maintained by social reinforcement. Results showed that visual discriminative control of the direction of head turning can be achieved. (WY)

Results of this study indicate that learning occurred only under immediate reinforcement and that there was no developmental trend in the ability to withstand the detrimental effects of delayed reinforcement. (WY)

The purpose of the current article is to highlight the importance of operant techniques in developmental research. Although many researchers employ operant techniques within their individual fields of study, the pervasive nature of these techniques is not often acknowledged in the general literature. The present article describes the history of…

Sixty-five infants (mean age of 111 days) who failed to complete a two-day operant-conditioning task were compared with a stratified random sample of those who did on measures of infant temperament and several demographic characteristics. A discriminant-function analysis was performed. (Author/BN)

Assesses the long-term retention of conditioned operant footkicks by three-month-old infants. Views a conditioning analysis as a logical means by which to bridge the gap between animal and adult human models of memory. (Author/RH)