Question

Name some of the discriminative and motivational functions of antecedent stimuli. What are some real life examples?

Answer 1

Antecedent refers to an event that has happened in the past. A stimulus is any object or activity that evokes a specific functional reaction. The Antecedent stimulus is used in studying behavioral psychology. It is the stimuli the learner responds to that means the event that happened prior to the response is Antecedent.

For example, the teacher asking a question is an antecedent stimulus, and the students’ answering is the response.

The Antecedent stimuli play two functions that are motivational and discriminative.

The Antecedent happens before the event that means it acts like triggering a behavior or act as prompts and cue.

For example, if we want to have a healthy lifestyle we should have good eating habits or we should do exercise like walking.

Suppose we want to improve our physical health we know that walking is good exercise, but if we go walking at night we miss our favorite TV show, we aim to meet our goal and have time to watch the TV show as well.

Now, the option is antecedent or a cue that by changing the timing for the walk instead of going after the dinner make it evening or afternoon. This way the goal will be reached as we know the event before, and that can be changed to meet our goal. This way the antecedent stimuli help in adopting a good habit.

The antecedent stimuli, that acts as a discriminative stimulus is those that have control over our behavior because it was already reinforced. When the behavior is controlled by the stimulus it is likely to happen in the future.

For example, children asking for candy in the presence of their grandfather knows when the grandfather is present they will get the candy. This behavior was already reinforced. The grandfather is the discriminative stimuli and asking candy is the behavior that was already developed.

A discriminative stimulus is also known as Sd.