... because the rate of responding decreased. The second week's results showed that high tone was the stimulus used to discriminate between the stimuli. These results supported both the hypotheses, and it was concluded that rats do demonstrate stimulus discrimination and selective stimulus control. The major theorists for the development of operant conditioning were Edward Thorndike (1910), John Watson (1914), and Burrhus Skinner (1938) (Huitt and Hummel, 1997). They proposed that learning is the result of the application of consequences following overt behaviour; that is, subjects begin to connect certain responses with certain stimuli. This led Thorndike to conclude that the probability of a specific response reoccurring is changed according to the consequences following the response, and he labelled this learning conditioning (Carlson and Buskist 1997, Huitt and Hummel, 1997). In 1910, Thorndike used the notion of 'consequences' to teach cats and dogs to manipulate a latch in a "puzzle-box", to ...

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