Page 365 - Zoo Animal Learning and Training

Glossary 337

VetBooks.ir reinforcers A consequential stimulus syntactical ability A metalinguistic skill,
which concerns the ability to consider the
occurring contingent on a behaviour that
increases or maintains the strength (rate,
duration, and so on) of the behaviour. structure rather than the meaning of a
sentence.
schedules of reinforcement A rule theory of mind The ability to attribute
governing the delivery of reinforcers. mental states – beliefs, intents, desires,
secondary reinforcers Reinforcers that are emotions, knowledge, etc. – to oneself,
dependent on their association with other and to others, and to understand that
reinforcers. others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and
semantic ability Language skills refer to an perspectives that are different from one’s
understanding and appropriate use of own.
meaning in single words, phrases, ultimate cause The cause you can trace
sentences, etc. back to the beginning: the very first event
sensitive periods A time or stage in a in a chain of causes.
person’s development when they are more unconditional stimuli A stimulus, the
responsive to certain stimuli and quicker capacity of which to elicit a response does
to learn particular skills. not depend upon its having been paired
shaping The reinforcement of successive with another stimulus possessing this
approximations of a target behaviour. capacity.
stationing Refers to teaching an animal to variable interval A schedule in which a
go to, and stay on, a home base of some person is reinforced for the first response
sort. after a varying period of time has passed
stereotypies Rhythmic, repetitive, fixed, since the previous reinforcement.
predictable, purposeful, but purposeless variable ratio A schedule of reinforcement
movements. in which one response is reinforced after a
stimuli A physical object or event that has variable amount of time has passed.
an effect on the behaviour of an individual. working memory The part of short‐term
stimulus control The control that stimuli in memory that is concerned with
our environment acquire over the immediate conscious perceptual and
behaviour we emit in their presence. linguistic processing.