Operant–Respondent Interrelationships and the Biological Context of Conditioning

So far, we have considered operant and respondent behavior as separate domains. Respondent behavior is elicited by the events that precede it, and operants are strengthened (or weakened) by stimulus consequences that follow them. Assume that you are teaching a dog to sit and you are using food reinforcement. You might start by saying “sit,” push the animal into a sitting position, and follow this posture with food. After training, you present the dog with the discriminative stimulus “sit,” and it quickly sits. This sequence nicely fits the operant paradigm-the SD “sit” sets the occasion for the response of sitting, and food reinforcement strengthens this behavior (Skinner, 1953).