B. F. Skinner Bio

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Burrhus Frederic Skinner was a behavior psychologist, inventor, and a philosopher. B. F. Skinner was born on March 20, 1904 in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania to Grace and William Skinner. His father was a lawyer. He received a B.A. in English literature in 1926 from Hamilton College then decided to leave behind his career as a novelist and entered the psychology graduate program at Harvard University. Skinner married Yvonne Blue in 1936, and the couple went on to have two daughters, Julie and Deborah. Even though B.F. Skinner has completed many amazing things; he has done two ports that has contributed to the science community for decades. First point is Skinner conducted research on operant conditioning and negative reinforcement. He developed a device called the "cumulative recorder, a device used to analyze operant behavior in which a pen that rides on a slowly-moving piece of paper is deflected upward with each response. This creates a graph or cumulative record which shows the cumulative number of responses as a function of time. Using this device, he found that behavior did not depend on the preceding stimulus as Watson and Pavlov maintained. Instead, Skinner established that behaviors were needed ahead on what happens after the response, Skinner called this Operant behavior. Second point is Skinner created the “Skinner Box” which was an machinery for studying instrumental conditioning in animals (typically rats or pigeons) in which the animal is isolated and provided with a lever or switch that it learns to use to obtain a reward, such as a food pellet, or to avoid a punishment, such as an electric shock. That he used to learn, which a rat learned to obtain food by pressing a lever. Skinner contributions to world in psychology were phenomenal. Skinner was inexhaustible author publishing nearly 200 articles and more than 20 books like The Origins of Cognitive

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