BF Skinner Rigged the Cages of Pigeons So That Food

question 72

Multiple Choice

B.F. Skinner rigged the cages of pigeons so that food was delivered every 15 seconds. Within a short time most of the pigeons were practicing some sort of consistent behavior, even though the behavior did not have any effect on the delivery of the reinforcer. The birds were:

• A) demonstrating spontaneous recovery.
• B) developing phobias.
• C) demonstrating the partial reinforcement effect.
• D) behaving superstitiously.

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Definitions:

Variance

A measure of dispersion indicating how far individual values in a dataset are from the mean.

Standard Deviation

A measure of the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of values; a low standard deviation indicates that the values tend to be close to the mean.

Sampling Distribution

The probability distribution of a given statistic based on a random sample.

Chi-square Distribution

A probability distribution commonly used in statistical significance tests.