Conditioning

Recently our family got a new pet, it’s a cat. Before when the cat was smaller he couldn’t jump onto the kitchen table, and wasn’t able to try to eat our food. Now that the cat has gotten big enough he starts jumping at any chance he gets to grab a bite of any food that is left out on the table or while someone is eating it. He doesn’t care weather you see him do it or not.

I chose operant conditioning because I thought it would work the best for this experiment. Operant conditioning is: A process of behavior modification in which the likelihood of a specific behavior is increased or decreased through positive or negative reinforcement each time the behavior is exhibited, so that the subject comes to associate the pleasure or displeasure of the reinforcement with the behavior.

What I am going to do is fill a spray bottle with water. Every time that the cat grabs some food I will spray him with water in the face. I am hoping that after doing this several times the cat will associate eating our food with the unpleasant spray of water in his face and will stop eating our food all at once.

The experiment was a failure, although I sprayed