Different discrimination procedures and affecting variablesd

Abstract

Discrimination is a wide field of research comprised of both smaller and larger research areas, such as sensory discrimination, concept formation, and discrimination learning. Discrimination can be defined as learning to differentiate between stimuli through differential reinforcement. Responding in the presence of some properties, or aspects of a stimulus is reinforced and extinguished in their absence. This creates a differentiated responding to certain stimuli, a response only occurring in their presence. Discrimination learning can be taught in both applied and experimental settings with all living organisms. There are two main procedures for teaching discrimination learning, successive and simultaneous procedure. They differ in how the stimuli samples are presented. Simultaneous procedure presents all samples at the same time while successive presents only one at the time. Both procedures operate with reinforcement and extinction. (Catania, 2013).There are other procedures available that combine reinforcement and extinction with negative reinforcement and/or punishment, such as errorless learning (Arantes & Machado, 2011) and learning with correction (Armus, Montgomery & Gurney, 2006). Matching-to- sample procedures (Steingrímsdóttir & Arntzen, 2011) and prompting procedures are also relevant (Cooper, Heron, & Heward, 2007). The following two articles will review and investigate the basics of discrimination learning. The first article will be comprised of a literary overview of discrimination procedures in and its affecting variables. The second will be an experimental article looking into the compared difficulties of simultaneous and successive discrimination procedure in applied settings with animals.