Instinctive drift, alternately known as instinctual drift, is the tendency of an animal to revert to unconscious and automatic behaviour that interferes with learned behaviour from operant conditioning. Instinctive drift was coined by Keller and Marian Breland, former students of B.F. Skinner at the University of Minnesota, describing the phenomenon as "a clear and utter failure of conditioning theory." B.F. Skinner was an American psychologist and father of operant conditioning (or instrumental conditioning), which is learning strategy that teaches the performance of an action either through reinforcement. It is through the association of the behaviour and the reward or consequence that follows that depicts whether an animal will maintain a behaviour, or if it will become extinct. Instinc