Snacks For Positive Reinforcement

This goes with ThereMustBeFood. Food for developers that is provided to help keep morale high, and keep the developers happy doing their job.

A hungry stomach stops a brain from functioning.

I've also been in a (non-programming) seminar where the speaker would reward right answers by tossing a candy to the answerer. Caution: don't try this with lollipops or hard candies! --RobMandeville

To quote WilliamGibson: "Does the name 'Pavlov' ring a bell?"

XP: "More catchphrases than you can shake a stick at"

Pavlov had nothing to do with positive reinforcement. The origin of the concept goes to Thorndike's "Law of Effect" which poorly described the concept which would be sharpened and vastly expanded upon by B.F.Skinner in his landmark 1938 work The Behavior of Organisms. While Pavlovian conditioning would pair a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus to elicit a conditioned response, Operant Conditioning would follow correct responses with reinforcing stimuli to generate greater probabilities of that response reoccuring. Pavlovian conditioning was the foundation of early Behaviorism, but it basically failed to account for much of what we consider "free" or volitional action. However, Skinner's operant conditioning theory explains human and animal behavior with great success leading to such things as...candy being thrown to crowds for correct (or even approximately correct) responding. Skinner's field of psychology is now known as Behavior Analysis and his much maligned work Verbal Behavior (1958) has produced significant and empirically verifiable benefits to Autistic children everywhere. -MR

CategoryFoodAndDrink