Operant conditioning is B.F. Skinner’s name for instrumental learning: learning by consequences. Not a new idea, of course. Humanity has always known how to teach children and animals by means of ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American While second nature to many of us, driving a ...

Burrhus Frederic Skinner became one of the nation’s most influential psychologists. His theory of operant conditioning, with its ideas about reinforcement through rewards and punishments, found its ...

What is operant conditioning and how does it apply to how we train our horses? We have already looked at how the first two levels of learning theory apply to our horses in this exclusive series on how ...

A long-standing debate in neuroscience is whether classical and operant conditioning are mechanistically similar or distinct. The feeding behavior of Aplysia provides a model system suitable for ...