Behaviorist and Mentalist.pptx

Behaviorist and Mentalist

1. Behaviorist and Mentalist Theories Dr.VMS

2. Behaviorism and Mentalism Behaviorism is based on observation and empirical evidence, whereas mentalism relies on pure belief. The theory of behaviorism suggests that behavior is simply a conditioned response to certain triggers, or stimuli, that occurs without regard to feelings. By contrast, mentalism is a theory based on the perceived power of thought processes, learned through experience or through an apprenticeship with an experienced mentalist.

3. Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything. B.F. Skinner American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher.[2][3][4][5] He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.

4. B.F. Skinner Behaviorist Skinner and his followers are known as behaviorist. According to them language learning is a process known as operant conditioning. Conditioned Behavior - behavior in which the training is repeated. Operant – voluntary behavior; it is the result of the learner’s own free will, and it is not forced by any person or thing from the outside. The learner demonstrates the new behavior first as a response to a system of reward or punishment, and finally as an automatic response.

5. Behaviorist Approach They put a rat in a box containing a bar. If it presses the bar, it is rewarded with a pallet of food. Nothing forces it to push the bar. • It probably does accidentally at the first time. When the rat finds out that food will arrive, it will press the bar again. • Task was made difficult; the rat only gets rewarded with food if it presses the bar while a light is flashed. At first the rat was puzzled but eventually learns the trick. To make it more difficult, the rat can only receive food if it presses the bar more than once. • After initial confusion it learned to do so. And so on, and so on.

6. Operant conditioning  In Operant conditioning, reinforcement plays a vital role. • TWO kinds of Reinforcement: 1. Positive Reinforcement (Praise and rewards) 2. Negative Reinforcement (Rebuke and punishments)

7. Noam Chomsky Noam Chomsky explicitly rejects the behaviorists’ position that language should be thought of as verbal behavior, arguing that it should be thought of as knowledge held by those who use language. Chomsky suggests that the learner of any language has an inbuilt learning capacity of language that enables each learner to construct a kind of personal theory or set of rules about the language based on very limited exposure to language.

8. Mentalist Chomsky and his mentalist followers claim that a child learns his first language through cognitive learning. They claim that language is governed by rules, and is not a haphazard thing, as Skinner and his followers would claim. According to Chomsky, the child is born with a mental capacity for working out the underlying system to the jumble of sounds which he hears. He constructs his own grammar and imposes it on all the sound reaching his brain.

9. Mentalist The mental grammar is part of his cognitive framework, and nothing he hears is store in his brain until he has matched it against what he already knows and found a ‘correct’ place for it within this framework. Chomsky argues that language is so complex that it is almost incredible that it can be acquired by a child in a so short of time. • He says that a child is born with some innate mental capacity which helps the child to process all the language which he hears. Mentalism • Language learning is innate ability • Mental (own rules) and Grammatical sentences  

10. Thank You