Beyond the "hot-and-cold" game: a demonstration of computer-controlled shaping

Shaping, or the method of successive approximations, is widely taught in introductory psychology and the psychology of learning as a procedure for establishing new behavior. This article illustrates a computer-controlled shaping demonstration that allows the user to specify several critical parameters of the shaping process and that then shapes the user's mouse movements toward an arbitrary virtual (invisible) target on the computer screen. The relative effectiveness of different shaping parameters can be assessed by examining several dependent measures, such as the distance of the cursor from the target across time and the rate at which reinforcers were earned. This demonstration allows students to move beyond the notion that shaping is simply the application of the "hot-and-cold" game and to understand that there is a science underlying the art of shaping.