Trivia
HardFamed Psychologist B.F. Skinner Once Taught Pigeons To?

Answer: Play Ping-Pong
B.F. Skinner was a highly influential 20th-century psychologist who founded the Radical Behaviorism school of psychological inquiry. He was singularly focused not on understanding the human mind as the psychologists that preceded him were, but in understanding how the environmental factors around us gave rise to our actions—a process he called operant conditioning.
He studied animals extensively over his career and used them as models to study operant conditioning wherein he could take even the smallest tasks, and through careful reinforcement, string them together so that the animal would perform them. Although his experiments were always serious scientific inquiries, Skinner was never against injecting a bit of levity into his work.
One of the more notable examples of this was his 1950 experiment wherein he taught pigeons to play what looked a whole lot like a game of ping-pong. The birds were trained, through his conditioning techniques, to want to knock the ball past the other bird because, in doing so, they would unlock the feeding box on their side of the cage and be rewarded.
Trivia
HardThe McCollough Effect Can Alter What Perception For Months After Exposure?
Trivia
HardSimilar To The Y2K Bug, There’s A Looming Date Bug Triggered By The Year?
Trivia
EasyThe Loudest Sound In Recorded History Was The Result Of A?
Trivia
HardEarly Microchips Included What To Protect Chip Manufacturers?
Trivia
HardWhich U.S. City Has A Full Scale Replica Of The Parthenon?
Trivia
EasyWhich Of These Shows Ushered In Frequent Use Of Cliffhangers In Television?
Trivia
HardWhich Of These U.S. Cities Renamed Itself For A Day To Celebrate Pokemon?
Trivia
HardThe Only Actor Who Appears In Both The Star Trek Pilot And First Aired Episode Is?
Trivia
Very HardWhat Is The Largest Spacecraft to Perform an Autonomous Earth Orbit and Reentry?