range between $3,500 and $4,000 for one standard operant conditioning chamber. Prices from the main manufacturers and providers in the U.S. Unfortunately, the Skinner box is an expensive apparatus. For example, a light can indicate that lever-pressing would result in a food pellet, whereas a tone can indicate that the same response would cause the delivery of a foot shock. The audiovisual stimuli can serve as discriminative stimuli, signaling to the animal the opportunity to respond in order to obtain the desired outcome. Depending on the contingencies or relationships programmed by the experimenter, lever-press responding can result in either the delivery of food (i.e., positive reinforcement) or the removal or prevention of shock (i.e., negative reinforcement), as well as in the delivery of shock (i.e., positive punishment) or the removal or prevention of food (i.e., negative punishment). In this preparation, lever-pressing is the standard operant response that the animal can produce in order to interact with, or operate upon, the environment. In a standard operant conditioning chamber for rodents, the chamber also has a lever protruding from the wall, which can be depressed (operant conditioning chambers for pigeons will instead have keys that can be pecked). This apparatus basically consists of a chamber with light bulbs and speakers mounted on the walls in order to provide visual and auditory stimuli a food dispenser connected to a magazine or hopper, which can deliver food pellets Footnote 1 and a metal grid floor, which can deliver mild electric foot shocks. Skinner (1904–1990)-is still today the standard apparatus for the experimental study of animal behavior in psychology and behavioral neuroscience (see Skinner, 1938).
The operant conditioning chamber-most commonly known as the “Skinner box” after its inventor, the great American behaviorist B.
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