SKINNER EARLY RESEARCH - FROM REFLEXOLOGY TO OPERANT-CONDITIONING

The facts of Skinner's research in the 1930s on the acquisition of operant behavior are combined with his own later comments. Skinner discovered that a single reinforcement is enough for conditioning of an arbitrary response. The combination of successive extinction curves after single reinforcements within one session led to the first schedule of intermittent reinforcement. Operant conditioning also could be arranged to generate new forms of behavior by shaping by successive approximation. Skinner was first influenced by the then dominant terminology of reflexology, but he soon rejected this stimulus-response tradition by demonstrating that eliciting stimuli play no role in operant conditioning. Theoretical implications of Skinner's early research are compared and contrasted with other theories of conditioning at the time.