Word: skinners
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...similar process, Skinner has taught pigeons to dance with each other, and even to play Ping Pong. During World War II, he conceived the idea of using pigeons in guided-missile control; three birds were conditioned to peck continuously for four or five minutes at the image of a target on a screen. Then they were placed in harness in the nose of a missile, facing a screen on which the target would appear when the missile was in flight. By pecking at the image moving on the screen, the pigeons would send corrective signals that moved the missile...
...these conditioning feats were accomplished with the now-famous Skinner box. It is a soundproof enclosure with a food dispenser that a rat can operate by pressing a lever, and a pigeon by pecking a key. The dispenser does not work unless the animal has first performed according to a specially designed "schedule of reinforcement...
...Explains Skinner: "One of the most powerful schedules, the variable-ratio schedule, is characteristic of all gambling systems. The gambler cannot be sure the next play will win, but a certain mean ratio of plays to wins is maintained. This is the way a dishonest gambler hooks his victim. At first the victim is permitted to win fairly often. Eventually he continues to play when he is not winning at all. With this technique, it is possible to create a pathological gambler out of a simple bird like a pigeon...
...while, that beguiling possibility and others suggested by Skinner left the academic world pretty cold, as did his first book, The Behavior of Organisms, published in 1938. "People didn't reinforce me, but my rats did," Skinner says regretfully, remembering how rewarded he felt every time...
...rewarded in a different way?his first general public recognition?when in 1945 the Ladies' Home Journal printed a piece about another kind of Skinner box, the so-called air crib (see box, page 51). By the time the Journal article was printed, Skinner had finished writing his second book, though he did not find a publisher for it until 1948. The work was Waiden Two, completed in seven weeks of impassioned creativity. Writing it, says Skinner, was "pretty obviously a venture in self-therapy in which I was struggling to reconcile two aspects of my own behavior, represented...