Author: crg5730

In fourth grade, my teacher held a reading competition to encourage us all to read outside of our class assignments. She created a chart containing each student’s name, and she would place a sticker next to our name every time we finished a book. After every ten books we read, she would give us a small prize, such as a piece of candy or a small toy. Additionally, the first five students to read one hundred books received a gift card. I remember thinking that this was just a fun activity and a way to get some prizes, but my teacher knew better and was very strategic in presenting this competition to us. She was utilizing operant conditioning to get us to read more often.

Operant conditioning is a learning process that forms associations between behaviors and resulting events. Reinforcers, which are events that strengthen the resulting behavior, are used to guide the subject towards performing a desired behavior. One type of reinforcement is positive reinforcement, which strengthens the desired behavior by presenting positive stimuli.

 A recognizable example of operant conditioning is training a dog to do tricks by providing treats when they do the action correctly. In this case, giving the dog a treat is the positive reinforcement, and performing the trick is the desired behavior. In my example of my teacher’s reading competition, she provided positive reinforcement, the prizes, to lead us towards the desired behavior, reading. 

These examples of operant conditioning through the use of positive reinforcement prove that behavior can be learned and that rewarded behavior is more likely to occur. Positive reinforcement is used much more often than people are aware of, because it is effective and enjoyable for those receiving it. Operant conditioning with positive reinforcement is a useful tool for teaching, especially in a school setting or with children, because it creates

A few months after graduating high school, I ran into a girl from my class. Considering we were about to leave for college, we were feeling sentimental and began reminiscing. I was telling her a story from earlier that year. I remembered all the details but when I was about to say the name of one of our classmates, I completely blanked. I was in homeroom with her for four years and knew that I knew her name, but I just could not remember it. It was as if her name was “on the tip of my tongue”.

This feeling that I knew her name and that it was just out of reach is an example of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is a form of retrieval failure, which is one explanation for forgetting memories. A retrieval failure is the inability to access a long-term memory until the correct retrieval cue, or trigger, is used. Tip of the tongue is the title placed upon the experience of being unable to remember a word but being able to say things about the word, such as its starting letter or how many letters it contains. A person will be able to describe specific details of the word, but will be unable to say the word out loud until something happens that cues their memory and allows them to retrieve the word. 

In my experience mentioned above, I knew the girl’s name started with the letter M, but could not remember her full name. This is because the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon occurs when some elements of the word are known, causing the false confidence, but ultimately, the entire word cannot be retrieved. When a retrieval failure occurs, the word being looked for is in long-term memory, but is not accessible for some reason. The word may come to the person several hours or days after trying to recall it, or it may be remembered sooner if something is mentioned that cues the memory. Memory storage and retrieval are very complex, so it is hard to know what exactly causes failures in retrieval, such as the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, to take place.