Operant Conditioning and Gestalt Psychology Flashcards

Flashcards on B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning and Gestalt psychology.

Operant Conditioning

Learning in which an action is reinforced or punished, resulting in corresponding increases or decreases in occurrence.

Positive Reinforcement (+R)

Adding something good to increase a behavior.

Positive Punishment (+P)

Adding something bad to decrease a behavior.

Negative Punishment (-P)

Delaying something good to decrease a behavior.

Negative Reinforcement (-R)

Delaying something bad to increase a behavior.

Gestalt psychology

A theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principles of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies.

Gestalt effect

Refers to the form-forming capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves.

Emergence

The whole is identified before the parts; process of forming complex patterns from simple rules.

Reification

An aspect of perception in which the object as perceived contains more spatial information than what is actually present; filling in gaps of what we think we should see.

Multi-stability

The mind seeks to avoid uncertainty; tendency of ambiguous perceptual experiences to pop back and forth unstably between two or more alternative interpretations.

Invariance

A property of perception in which simple objects are recognized independent of their rotation, translation and scale.