Sarah gets a weekly allowance, but only if all of her chores are completed by 5 p.m. on Friday night. Although Sarah does some work around the house during the week, most of her chores are done in a burst of activity after she comes home from school on Friday afternoon. Sarah's behavior is being maintained on a _____ schedule of reinforcement.

The theory of reinforcement elaborated by Skinner, also known as operant conditioning or instrumental conditioning, attempts to explain human behavior in correspondence with the environment or the stimuli that surround it.

Through the experimental method, Skinner concludes that the appearance of a stimulus triggers a response in the person. If this response is conditioned using positive or negative reinforcers, an influence may be exerted on said reaction or operant behavior, which can be enhanced or inhibited.

Skinner established that the behavior is maintained from one context or situation to another as long as the consequences, that is, the reinforcers do not change or do so following certain logics, "rules" that must be discovered. As a consequence, both human and animal behavior can be conditioned or modified using a series of stimuli that the subject may consider satisfactory or not.

Explained in a simpler way, the Theory of reinforcement emphasizes that a person is more likely to repeat a behavior that is reinforced in a positive way, as well as being more likely to repeat those that are associated with negative stimuli or reinforcements.

Intermittent reinforcement

In these cases only the behavior of the person is reinforced on certain occasions. This program in turn is subdivided into two categories: interval reinforcement (fixed or variable) or ratio reinforcement (fixed or variable)

In the interval reinforcement the behavior is reinforced after a previously established period of time (fixed) or a random period of time (variable). While in the reinforcement of reason the person has to carry out a certain number of behaviors before it is reinforced. As in the interval reinforcement this number of responses can be previously agreed (fixed) or not (random).