Author Archives: Kendall Adair Pierce

Operant Conditioning

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Being a part of the Women’s Volleyball team is an incredible experience and opportunity. However it also can be very hard. The beauty about the way Coach Rose runs the program is that he accepts, encourages and appreciates all of the different playing styles that individuals bring to the team. Yet, being a stickler for tradition, there are many behaviors that you quickly are forced to learn and do. So in a way, I am trying to relate our volleyball program and learning process to operant conditioning. When talking about shaping with the dog, I somehow spin it in my head to relate to my training. With the dog, the reinforce guides behavior closer towards a desired behavior. So if you want to dog to roll over you have to teach him in steps; give him the treat when he sits, then when he lays down and finally when he rolls over. Similar to training, you can’t spike a ball without first learning the footwork, and arm swing. For myself, I am a backrow player. When I first got to college all I wanted to do was jump in and play with the big girls… until I realized my skill level wasn’t quite at their speed. It was kind of like asking a puppy to run before it knew how to walk. So I had to start with the puppy training. I started with doing floor work and moving without the ball, practicing sprawls, dives, rolls and etc each and every way. Next came working in the ball off a toss with a partner, then off a hit ball, then a live approach to finally a live game. The only way these stages progressively worked however was by performing each step the desired way. I would get a compliment or be allowed to move onto the next step of the process if I did it right (my doggie treat), and would stay at the same level, most likely getting yelled at or corrected until I did it the right way.

As for the team, coach holds a couple cardinal traditional rules that you don’t want to break. One of them being always go for a ball with two hands. “ God gave you two for a reason, USE THEM” hell say; the other being, never let a ball drop without going to the floor with it, if you miss a serve, you hit the floor and roll, if somebody passes your serve with your hands you do pushups, if the ball goes between your legs you do a suicide and so on. Coming in as a freshman, is kind of a “ figure it out yourself” kind of thing; it’s what makes us so tough. So similar to the dog analogy, you can tell the dog don’t do this, don’t do that but do this, yet words don’t always get through to them as much as the actions that follow each behavior. There were no written rules about the ones my coach holds you accountable for anywhere but I quickly figured them out when I was continually punished for breaking each one of them. Then, you could say there was always negative reinforcement being used where by removing going with one hand, missing serves and serving easy balls (decreasing inappropriate behavior and increasing the desired behavior), the negative stimuli (doing suicides, running, or holding defensive position for 40 minutes was removed.

Although we train like dogs, WE still ARE….. Nittany Lions.

Real Memories?

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How do we know if the things in our head actually happend? How can we decifer what is true or false or what is real and fake? The answer to that, is we can’t. We can’t really be sure if a memory of true or false without evidence. Not to say that all our memories are false, in fact most of them are true, or else our life would me a mess, but a memory phenomena that shows evidence of the inaccuracy of memory is memory implantation. Memory implantation is a technique used in cognitive psychology to investigate human memory. In memory implantation studies researchers make people believe that they remember an event that actually never happened. The false memories that have been successfully implanted in people’s memories include remembering being lost in a mall as a child, taking a hot air balloon ride, and putting slime in a teacher’s desk in elementary school. Memory implantation techniques were developed in the 1990s as a way of providing evidence of how easy it is to distort people’s memories of past events.

An example of this was explained in class with the “Remember When Game”. In this scenario, a young child was asked about 5 memories, where only 4 were genuine. However when asked about this made up event a couple days later, the child remembered it and recalled details of the even that had never been described to him, and had never happened.

Fortunatley, just this break I was saved from going home to the horrid winter weather in Buffalo NY and instead was invited on my friends family trip to Disney. Knowing I would have to take a break from the sun and sand at some point to do this blog I thought about what do to it on on the plane ride over. I thought one of the most interesting topics we covered in class was memory implantation. And so, I conducted my own experiment. A couple nights before going to the Disney parks prior to family dinner, I pulled her mom aside and asked her to help me out. I briefly explained to her my project and the topic at hand and asked that when talking about memories to throw in a false one.

So at dinner, many stories were brought up in our excitment to return to the parks now a couple years older including one that was made up by my friends mother. This memory included my friend being terrified of Mickey Mouse.

The next day we went to Magic Kingdom and on our walk towards the castle I asked my friend if she was still afraid of Mickey. She then went on to say, “Guys, you don’t understand…. He tried picking me up and I didn’t like getting picked up and his face was scary up close. Then when he set me down I ran away behind my mom and he came after me and tried getting a hug from me”.

We later that night explained to my friend that her memory and fear of Mickey wasn’t real… but it was difficult for her to wrap her head around and instead insisted we were playing a mean joke on her.

Behaviorism: Give me anyone, and I can make them into Anything

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“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.”

–John Watson, Behaviorism, 1930

 

The term behaviorism refers to the belief that behaviors can be measured, trained, and changed. Also known as behavior psychology, behaviorism is a theory of learning based on the idea that all behaviors are acquired through conditioning. Conditioning therefore occurs through interaction with the environment, which then makes behaviorists believe that our responses to environmental stimuli shape our behaviors.

As Watson’s above quote suggests, strict behaviorists believe that any person could potentially be trained to perform any task, regardless of things like genetic background, personality traits, and internal thoughts (within the limits of their physical capabilities); all it takes is the right conditioning.

For instance, I grew up in a very small farm town with a graduating class of 100. The class a year older than me however had a class of almost 200, and out of them probably only half would graduate. Going into my 6th grade year was when I met this kid in the 7th grade Rick. We were both on the track team and I got to know him better, but still didn’t know everything about him. I did learn however that his parents were both drunks, one in jail and the other non-existent and that he was currently sleeping under the high school bleachers on the high jump mats. Through out the years, my mother who came to both of our track meets got to meet Rick too, and although he would never ask for help, food, money or a place to stay my mom would kind of help him out. We didn’t officially adopt him or take him under our roof, but we called him family. We did what we could to help support him, feed him meals and even reconnect with some local grandparents. We helped him with homework, got him tutors, helped him with his college admissions, and watched him graduate high school and earn a full ride scholarship to go to college. From there we watched him take off, he did a couple of magazine shoots and modeled for Hollister and Abercrombie and Fitch, he was asked to do multiple NYC fashion shows and offered a salary many people wouldn’t turn down. He instead enlisted in the army, got selected and graduated from Ranger school, one of the toughest programs out there.

This example here goes to show a couple of fitting objectives when it comes to studying behaviorism. First, due to his upbringing, Rick was never dependent on anyone, never asked for help because he was never used to receiving help, and also didn’t believe he was worthy of anything good. So at first, he was very reluctant towards help, and saw it that he could find ways to survive on his own without other peoples pity party. However, with a little acceptance of help he started to see rewards. He started doing well in school, and for the first time saw graduation as a possible thing. On top of that he had colleges asking for him.

Therefore in this situation, it was difficult to control Rick’s complete environment without overstepping too many lines, but by the way my mother and I helped mold his surroundings, I believe that we helped shape his future for the better.

-Kendall Pierce