Nash is fed up with hearing his friends brag about the tricks their dogs can do, so he decides to train Indigo, his hyacinth macaw, how to shoot a basketball, using a bird-size ball and hoop. He starts out by giving Indigo a treat for touching the ball with its beak. When Indigo reliably touches the ball, Nash begins reinforcing Indigo for picking the ball up in its beak, and, behavior by behavior, eventually trains Indigo to shoot hoops. Nash is using ____.

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

Nash is using shaping, a type of operant conditioning where a behavior is gradually shaped through reinforcement of successive approximations. He is reinforcing each step towards the final behavior of shooting a basketball hoop. He is not using reflex arcs, classical conditioning, or observational learning in this scenario.

Nash Is Fed Up with Hearing His Friends Brag About