Schedules of Reinforcement
I started off the experiment with a VR-5 in which Sniffy had to make an average of up to 5 responses before beginning to reinforce on the VR-5 schedule. I observed that the schedule made sniffy respond at a higher rate after the five responses. At some point, he depicted signs of extinguishing, but later on, he showed strength and association. This was revealed by a change in the level of graphs indicating that Sniffy was indeed learning a new schedule. Due to these findings, I went ahead to adjust it to the VR-10 schedule to reveal Sniffy’s unreinforced trails.
I was able to adjust from VR-5 to eventually VR-20 progressively. I achieved this by typing 10 in the textbox that is below the design operant conditioning the experiment. It led to the weakening of the action strength, which was rectified when I hanged it to VR-20. I further adjusted it to VR-50 to complete the experiment. The step by step adjustments helped me monitor Sniffy’s behaviour throughout the experiment. The result was that sniffy was adjusting well to the new schedule. I did not encounter any challenges in adjusting from VR-5 all the way to VR-50.
From my experiment, the response rate is higher when sniffy is on a VR-10 than when I adjusted it to VR-50 schedule. The cumulative record indicates that the VR-5 lines are less steeper as compared to schedule lines on VR-50.
The behaviour will appear different sine the bars of association window will have dropped suddenly without notice. It is likely to cause the extinction of sniffy because no reinforcement was done to sniffy by pressing the bar severally.