Classical vs operant conditioning

Classical vs operant conditioning Classical vs operant conditioning? Sure, you've heard of them both? But what do they mean? And why do they matter? The easiest way to differentiate between the two, is to realise that classical conditioning is an involuntary response and operant conditioning is a voluntary response. Classical - Pavlovs dog. Operant - Skinners box (although actually based on the work of thorndikes law of effect, with skinners addition of reinforcement). So. Classical conditioning. Pavlov rings a bell, and the dog begins to salivate in association with food. A more modern conversion of this, would be the clicker. The reason a clicker works, is because the dog associates the sound of the clicker, with the taste of the food, with the food being the reward. As is so, the sound of the clicker acts as a reward. We can implement here the use of reinforcement, as it's important that the clicker is reinforced in order to retain its value. If we were to keep clicking with no reward, the clicker would become valueless and so the clicker would not work. And that, would bring us to operant conditioning with skinners box. This experiment teaches us about positive and negative reinforcement, as well as punishment. Positive and negative reinforcement can be used to increase the likelihood of a behaviour, where a punishment can be used to decrease the likelihood of a repeated behaviour. Positive reinforcement is a positive reward. For example, a treat when your dog sits. Negative reinforcement is the removal of negative stimulus to reward. For example, when your dog stops pulling on the lead, then pressure around the neck is released and its comfortable for your dog. The removal of pressure, in this case, is the reward. A punishment will weaken the chance of a repeated behaviour occurring. For example your dog is chewing on some furnature and you tell him off, he is less likely to chew on that same object again. The reason that these two concepts are pretty important, is because we can use them to find creative ways of helping us train our dog. Theres is a very popular method of applying both of these concepts in a system known to translate to negative, positive, positive. This would mean... to apply negative pressure, such as tension around the collar. Ask the dog to sit, when the dog sits, release the pressure and then give a click and reward. This works, because we have negative reinforcement and positive reinforcement combined with an involuntary stimulus (the emotion connected with the click) which will help to train a behaviour. We can also use this system to remove body language from our training and have our dog respond just on the verbal command, but I will cover that at another time. As always, thanks for reading and feel free to comment below!