Imagine that you are teaching a young child to discriminate

Imagine that you are teaching a young child to discriminate between two different categories of items (you can decide what the groups consist of but make sure they are different from what I talked about in the lectures). How would you use discrimination training to teach the child to discriminate these two categories of items? Make sure to fully explain the procedure by identifying what will function as the SD, S-Delta, the target response, and the consequence.

Solution

Discrimination training -

This is a behaviour reinforcement, in the presence of one situation one stimulus , but not the other. This leads to a discriminative stimulus . The discriminative stimulus occurs when the behaviour is been successfully reinforced. After reinforcement of behaviour, the animal exhibits the behaviour in the presence of this discriminative stimulus.

The SD stimulus is the stimulus, in the presence of which the discrimination behaviour is not reinforced.

At first during discrimination training, the animal often responds in the presence of stimuli that are similar to the SD. These similar stimuli are S-deltas. Eventually, these S Delta responses get extinguished.

For eg: if we keep a deck red and blue cards and make a chicken peck on only one card, I.e. Red, then the behaviour can be reinforced. The chicken would initially peck on both the cards but with practice we can make it to select only red card. Here, we can give an example of S delta which might eventually get erased. If we remove the blue circle , then pecking would be only on the red circle and the blue circle memory would be removed.