Skinner boxes are a kind of apparatus used for conditioning and training animals in scientific studies. You’ll almost certainly have read about them or seen them on TV: an animal is rewarded with a treat for pressing a button; or trained to respond to a patter of lights or other stimuli (like shapes, music and other sounds, or drawings). This is the sort of arrangement where a sequence of behavioural primitives (light flashes green, animal pokes green button, is rewarded with a snack) can be threaded together to create really useful data for behavioural scientists.

See the article here:
Train your rat: behavioural science at home