Domjan, M. (2014).The principles of learning and behavior. Nelson Education (141-146)

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1. Define adventitious (or accidental) reinforcement.

2. Define superstitious behavior.

3. Provide an example of a behavior that is maintained by adventitious reinforcement.

4. What is the difference between temporal contiguity and response-reinforcer contingency? Provide an example.

5. Define temporal contiguity and its relevance to Skinner's superstitious experiment.

6. Describe Skinner's superstitious experiment (procedures and findings)

7. Why the Staddon & Simmelhag (1971) provides an alternative explanation to Skinner's study on superstition.

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Sheehan, K. J., Van Reet, J., & Bloom, C. M. (2012). Measuring preschoolers' superstitious tendencies.Behavioural Processes,91(2), 172-176.

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1. How this paper improve some of the previous research in superstition with children?

2. What are the similarities between Skinner and Morse (1957) paper and Sheehan et al. (2012) paper?

3. How the superstition procedure was conducted?

4. What were the main findings/results in this study? What the authors found?

5. How the results relate to the prediction/hypotheses set out in the introduction (i.e., are they supported or not)?

6. What are the implication of these findings?

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Doughty, A. H., Shahan, T. A., & Lattal, K. A. (2001). Superstitious responding and reinforcement rate under concurrent variable-interval extinction schedules. Behavioural Processes, 53(3), 163-170.

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1. Why using concurrent VI Ext schedules are a useful strategy to study superstitious behavior?

2. How the superstition procedure was conducted?

3. What were the main findings/results in this study? What the authors found?

4. How the results relate to the prediction/hypotheses set out in the introduction (i.e., are they supported or not)?