Talk:Experimental analysis of behavior

changes

I nuked 'experimental psychology'. Sorry, but its experimental, and its psychology, but skinner isn't an "experimental psychologist" which refers to a different research tradition he was not a part of. This is just wrong. SKinner's research comes from Loeb (biology) and philosophically Mach (physics). Not Wundt. Not psychophysics.

--Florkle 09:47, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

nuked references to classical conditioning. Skinner never did this research and there are /NO/ references to this work in EAB journals. It is not a part of the discipline, sorry. I nuked the ABC crap which is for kids and applied practitioners who can't grasp big words like "discriminative stimuli" and "motivating operations". ABC is a bad acronym as it swallows up two of the four term contingencies as "A". EOs are important. Also, removed the Sd description as it was confusing.

This page needs a lot of work. EAB is a huge mature discipline and this page does it no justice. Major figures might be added as well.

--Florkle 09:44, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Fixed numerous misspellings.

Added reference to 4 term contingencies and EOs which needs improvement.

Added section on contemporary researchers, many of whom made great contributions to EAB and are now dead (Lindsley/Keller, etc). Many others need to be added (Baum, Iwata, Neuringer, etc) who are active in this field and being published in JEAB/JABA.

Changed Behaviour to Behavior (American). Sorry kids, Behaviorism is American, so the US Spelling should predominate.?

Maybe I'm not as familiar with the experimental literature, but to me it seems like Lindsley and Keller are much better known for their applied work than for their experimental research. More prolific experimental behavior analysts would include people like Murray Sidman and, of course, B.F. Skinner. Lunar Spectrum | Talk 23:05, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

applied v. basic

EAB as I take it is a discipline that early on forked to split applied from basic research (e.g. JABA's creation) but as noted in (Neuringer 1981 Melioration & self-experimentation JEAB) and in other places this disctinction has come to be seen as problematic and to be reduced and not extended. Sidman would be good. He has no page, yeah?

--florkle 02:08, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

A question: Has it been taken into account in the experiment arrangements that since the animals are at the mercy of humans they have to listen to subtle social cues very carefully compared to free adult humans? So their behaviour just has to be primarily social whether that is their nature or not.

I'm not sure what you mean. I'm not aware of any research or writing referring to animal subjects responding to "subtle social cues," nor is the presence of an experimenter during the experiment necessarily the case. I know that the first extinction curve was graphed when BF Skinner left the laboratory and during the night the mechanical device that delivered reinforcement to the animal accidentally broke down. The next day Skinner came back to the lab and found that the cumulative recorder kept a record of what happened to the animal's behavior and realized what had happened. Also, you must realize that such experimental results must stand up to direct and systematic replication. I'm certainly willing to give animals the benefit of the doubt when it comes to picking up on cues given by experimenters, but for these cues to be responsible for the findings these cues would have to be present on a consistent basis. I find it very implausible that every behavioral laboratory the world over has been dropping social cues to influence the results in a consistent way.Lunar Spectrum | Talk 06:50, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

possible need for reversion

The mass of May 16 edits by user Florkle are so wrought with problems that I'm thinking that this article might need to be reverted to a version from before that date. If it was just one or two things, a simple correction would do, but the article has been changed in such a systematic way that reversion is easier than teasing all of them out. The edits in question seem to be generally of an attitude expressing that the experimental analysis of behavior is only about Skinner, incorporating some misunderstandings and fallacies, and overall producing an article that is less informative and accurate than before. Removing references to experimental psychology, for example, citing that Skinner wasn't an psychologist when in fact he was, is an example (while I strongly believe that Behavior Analysis has grown to be an independent field in its own right, that doesn't mean the historical connections are not there). Also, whereas the previous versions of the article included references to both rats and pigeons as common research subjects, the new edits seem not to like references to rats. The recent edits also seem bent on making EAB appear as if it's only about operant behavior when it is in fact inclusive of both respondent (classical) and operant behavioral research. Additionally, there seems to be a watering-down in the wording. Whereas before the article explicitly stated that "all behavior is lawful which lends itself to experimental control," it now reads simply that behavior can be "experimentally studied," which is less precise about the importance of experimental control in behavioral research (especially when compared to the lower standards of experimental psychology methods). Then there's this deal with a four-term contingency that adds more obscurity than clarity. The three-term contingency already includes antecedent stimulus topographies, and the previous version had already incorporated discussion of motivating operations. The use of a "four-term contingency" as described in behavioral research doesn't even match the role of motivating operations and actually means something different. I could go on and on... which is why I mention that it will probably have to be reverted. There are a few minor edits in there that would be nice to keep, but it will be easier to just add them back in after reversion. Lunar Spectrum | Talk 00:21, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

The Experimental Analysis of Behavior

EAB is derived from the subtitle of Skinner's Book The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis of Behavior. I never said he wasn't a psychologist, I said he wasn't an "experimental psychologist" from the tradition of Wundt.

Please feel free to site your historical connections I will gladly not touch any assertions that there are such connections. Otherwise, my sources say otherwise.

The four term contingency is standard current theory on the subject. Your three-term contingency analysis is 20 years or so out of date. It ignores the critical role of EOs and as such makes it less informative to cluser EOs and Sds together. Again, please feel free to cite your source. I believe Murray Sidman 1986 or so supports this, as well as it being extended by Jack Michael 199(2?) or so.

classical conditioning

yeah ok, maybe I downplayed the classical stuff, but EAB is well documented in two journals with "analysis of behavior" in their titles: JABA and JEAB - please feel free to show how much classical conditioning research is current and how much is historical. It's a footnote at best. Chapter 3 of Pierce & Cheney's (2004) Behavior Analysis and Learning has a chapter on respondent conditioning and reflexive behavior, so I am willing to concede that it is "a part" of the discipline, but not an important one. (you could argue that Chapter 7 has a little operant-respondent overlap as well, so maybe I overdid it, but not by much).

S-R psychology

My hope in de-emphasizing classical/respondent/reflexive conditioning is to deflect the misperception that Skinner (and EAB is Skinner's discipline) was an S-R psychologist. Which is to say that EAB is S-R psychology. It is not, he was not, and EAB is not.

--florkle 01:09, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

When Sidman is talking about a four-term contingency he's talking about conditional discrimination during matching-to-sample tasks in which three-term contingencies come under the control of an additional discriminative term (SD1 -> (SD2->R->Sr) which can potentially be generalized to n terms ), not referring to motivating operations. And while Jack Michael has done much to advance the importance of motivating operations and terminology, I don't think I can recall him ever using the phrase "four-term contingency" to describe it, although I have seen others sometimes refer to it as such. I personally have no qualm about motivating operations as part of a four-term contingency, but I am concerned about clarity in a wikipedia article. Motivating operations are kind of "messy" to explain because of their dual characteristics as a modulator of an organism's receptivity to consequences and as a stimulus capable of acquiring discriminative functions as per the reference included in the article. And from a strictly logical perspective, the conditional statement of EO + SD -> R -> Sr, while having four elements, is still composed of three clauses separated by two causal arrows. It's an area where terminological consistency is still being worked out.

4 term

Yeah ok, but I think this messy-ness is to be preferred in that it relates an important fourth variable. Perhaps I am being idiosyncratic. I am working from memory and I found references to five-term contingencies &c. depending on the source. As for clarity I have no idea what is considered "reasonable" clarity. So sure, it's an encyclopedia, but if it covers a technical topic what is "reasonably technical" and "too technical"?

--florkle 06:46, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

--

The experimental psychology issue: Experimental psychology does not refer to any particular school of thought, so the article's previous statement that EAB was Skinner's approach to experimental psychology does not peg him into Wundt in any way other than the fact they both used laboratories.

wundt

I beg to differ on this. I agree that Wundt & Skinner shared nothing but labs, but Wundt is, as I've been introduced to it, the inheritor of the title "experimental psychology". Do you have any sources for this? I will look for some. I agree that the title seems to be accurate but places Skinner in the wrong tradition (see Mecca Chiesa about this issue generally. Jacques Loeb was Watson's advisor and also influenced Crozier at Harvard when Skinner was there in terms of "whole organism research" (& pavlov). Is this the experimental psychology tradition you think of?

--florkle 06:46, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Respondent behavior should never be said to be "not an important" part of EAB. Radical Behaviorism states that everything we do is behavior. You can't just toss out the entire autonomic nervous system. Searching on JEAB's database I found a decent (though not large) number of studies relating to classical conditioning, even in recent years. One study in particular stood out because it investigated the ability of respondent behavior to participate in equivalence relations, not a trivial finding. Respondent behavior forms a very integral part of behaving organisms. Just because its contingencies differ from those of operant behavior it doesn't diminish its importance. I'm not familiar with the Pierce/Cheney text, but the level of prominence a subject is given within a single textbook shouldn't be a deciding factor. And the proper place to dismiss notions that BF Skinner was an S-R psychologist would be either in his own wikipedia article or in Radical Behaviorism. To do that here is not really relevant to the subject of the article. It could definitely fit into a Behavior Analysis article (I remember we used to have one, but somebody decided to merge it into ABA, something I wish to rectify once I can devote the attention to it). In any case, deleting references to respondent behavior is probably not the way to go about it. Personally, I'm leaning away from the idea of reverting the article, but there are things that I think need to be fixed. Lunar Spectrum | Talk 22:02, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

reflexes

Perhaps you are right about the misconceptuon issue being better address (perhasps under "misconceptions" which is under one of these pages. I still feel that the relative importance of reflexes should be explicitly addressed. SKinner rejected reflexes and EAB is Skinner' discipline formed by the SEAB when Skinner et al could not be published. I am willing to concede some importance from Pierce & Cheney - and you say it should not be decided based on one text. Ok, please provide another one? This textbook was from an EAB undergraduate course by that name so I feel confident it has some pretty direct bearing on the subject. I guess my beef is a)possble misperceptions and b)parallel wording "operant and classical" is technically correct but it suggests that they are 50-50 when it's more like 90-10...? Chomsky et al have had a field day attacking S-R psychology and equating it with Radical Behaviorism/EAB which it is not. Is it wrong to want to convey this relative importance issue here? It's not like this is "being hidden" and there are secret amounts of reflex/respondent studies being done.

I have started working on Verbal Behavior (book) so I am willing to concede most of the points frankly. Do you know any VB?

--florkle 06:46, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

By the way, please don't break up other people's posts the way you did above, especially not with the subtitle tags. The disorganization makes it very hard to read. Regarding the level of technicality involved in writing wikipedia articles, it's always going to be a balancing act. Encyclopaedias are written for the general audience, but at the same time we have to expect that the reader will be able to use the wiki links to clarify the concepts on their own. There's no denying that MOs need to be in there, but it needs to be organized in a way that's easy to learn from. I just think that it's easier to explain the three-term contingency first, and then explain how MOs affect those terms. It's the way that academic material is taught: The basics are explained first, and then special topics of greater complexity are added later. I guess I personally think that an encyclopaedia should be more than just a place for technical reference material, but also a tool for learning. The reason I like to contribute to these articles is so that people who don't completely understand behavior analysis can learn about it, not for experts to look at it so they can be reminded of what they already know.

Regarding Wundt: The only thing he will ever be remembered for is that he started the first psychology laboratory. That's all. Experimental psychology is littered with all sorts of different schools of thought. Just because they are all under the same umbrella, that doesn't mean people will confuse them all with Wundt's structuralism. Of course, I don't have any sources for this, but that's because one cannot prove a negative. So instead I would ask if there is any evidence that people actually confuse different schools of thought with Wundt's ideas. Since his conceptual work is not really taught anymore, outside of a history of psychology course, I don't think any such confusion is likely.

And it's not so much about a particular text's treatment of a subject like respondent behavior. It's that a textbook is something that is written to serve the learning objectives of a course. In most cases of behaviorist courses the objective is to teach about operant conditioning, so obviously respondent behavior is going to have a low profile in such a course unless the professor makes the effort to supplement it properly. It's rare for psychology departments to have more than a couple of courses pertaining to behavior analysis, so the fact that respondent conditioning is often treated as a footnote is not surprising. In my case, my professor could only spare one day of lecture to discuss the role of respondent conditioning in behavior analysis. You are absolutely correct that it's important to draw the distinction between S-R associationism and operant contingencies, but that is not accomplished by deleting information. The way the present article was previously written, the distinction was explicitly made between respondent contingencies and operant contingencies. That way, the reader would see that they are different because the article named them differently. With the respondent material gone, the reader cannot read about the distinctions that exist between respondent and operant.

On Verbal Behavior, yes, I have read the book. However, I have this bad habit of reading books only to about 80% through and then stopping. But having read most of it, I think it's very good. One of my favorite and most memorable insights he mentions (almost as if he was trying to pre-empt Chomsky's criticism) was how he explained grammar to be a discrimination of word order. It's a very good functional account of language, especially considering how this was before the role of stimulus equivalence in language learning was discovered. Lunar Spectrum | Talk 10:23, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

4 term contingency citations

Cited in Novak & Palaez Child & Adolescent Development: A Behavioral Systems Approach. 2004. Sage Publications:

Bijou & Baer, (1978) The behavior analysis of child development'. Englewood-cliffs, NJ:Prentice Hill Morris, E. K. (1992). The aim, progress, and evolution of behavior analysis, The Behavior Analyst, 15, 3-29

I was off bycalling it an EO instead of the later MO (to encompass both AO & EOs as a fourth term).

fwiw.

--florkle 01:06, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

How then does one respond to enormous blocks of text?

5-20-07

By the way, please don't break up other people's posts the way you did above, especially not with the subtitle tags.

how then do I reply to dozens of statements?

The disorganization makes it very hard to read. Regarding the level of technicality involved in writing wikipedia articles, it's always going to be a balancing act. Encyclopaedias are written for the general audience, but at the same time we have to expect that the reader will be able to use the wiki links to clarify the concepts on their own. There's no denying that MOs need to be in there, but it needs to be organized in a way that's easy to learn from. I just think that it's easier to explain the three-term contingency first, and then explain how MOs affect those terms. It's the way that academic material is taught: The basics are explained first, and then special topics of greater complexity are added later. I guess I personally think that an encyclopaedia should be more than just a place for technical reference material, but also a tool for learning. The reason I like to contribute to these articles is so that people who don't completely understand behavior analysis can learn about it, not for experts to look at it so they can be reminded of what they already know.

I guess this is just a judgement call, but I see 4 term as "the new basic" model not as the advanced model. I guess it's not really a big deal either way, although the way I have heard MOs discussed it maps to the reinforcing stimulus is a way that makes the whole thing make more sense to me. Otherwise "things just become or are posited as reinforcing", there is an S^D and then a response produces a reinforcing stimulus.

Regarding Wundt: The only thing he will ever be remembered for is that he started the first psychology laboratory. That's all. Experimental psychology is littered with all sorts of different schools of thought. Just because they are all under the same umbrella, that doesn't mean people will confuse them all with Wundt's structuralism. Of course, I don't have any sources for this, but that's because one cannot prove a negative. So instead I would ask if there is any evidence that people actually confuse different schools of thought with Wundt's ideas. Since his conceptual work is not really taught anymore, outside of a history of psychology course, I don't think any such confusion is likely.

If Skinner who is radically unlike the rest of structuralists (and behaviorists) is classified under "behaviorism" and "experimental psychology" but then it must be explained that he wasn't really much like them (i.e. he didn't develop their positions, use their methods or models) it begs the question of what is added by calling Skinner a behaviorist/experimental psychologist. I say nothing is added and it adds to what must then be "removed" from the explanation. Identify early and often Skinner's true philosophical and research lineage and leave the rest to thos e interested in the history of failed models and obscure trivia.

And it's not so much about a particular text's treatment of a subject like respondent behavior. It's that a textbook is something that is written to serve the learning objectives of a course. In most cases of behaviorist courses the objective is to teach about operant conditioning, so obviously respondent behavior is going to have a low profile in such a course unless the professor makes the effort to supplement it properly. It's rare for psychology departments to have more than a couple of courses pertaining to behavior analysis, so the fact that respondent conditioning is often treated as a footnote is not surprising. In my case, my professor could only spare one day of lecture to discuss the role of respondent conditioning in behavior analysis. You are absolutely correct that it's important to draw the distinction between S-R associationism and operant contingencies, but that is not accomplished by deleting information. The way the present article was previously written, the distinction was explicitly made between respondent contingencies and operant contingencies. That way, the reader would see that they are different because the article named them differently. With the respondent material gone, the reader cannot read about the distinctions that exist between respondent and operant.

Your previous argument about not being too much of a document for specialists seems to subtly contradict this point. Only specialists would need to know about the subtleties of respondent conditioning, and most of them aren't going to be really EAB researchers/enthusiasts, per se. The more general reader (say a person interested in Autism therapies) wouldn't get anything from a more detailed analysis of respondent behavior that couldn't be dealt with in classical conditioning. Perhaps a link to classical conditioning to that curious readers can read about respondent conditioning in detail if they want to compare and contrast?

On Verbal Behavior, yes, I have read the book. However, I have this bad habit of reading books only to about 80% through and then stopping. But having read most of it, I think it's very good. One of my favorite and most memorable insights he mentions (almost as if he was trying to pre-empt Chomsky's criticism) was how he explained grammar to be a discrimination of word order. It's a very good functional account of language, especially considering how this was before the role of stimulus equivalence in language learning was discovered. Lunar Spectrum

Please feel free to help me out with Verbal behavior if you are so inclined :-)

--florkle 02:21, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Theory?

Hi, I've been doing some work to this article today - mostly formatting, rewording, adding wikilinks, minor stuff. But I think there's a more minor change that should take place, in the section 'An anti-theoretical analysis?'. I did the same rewriting and reformatting there as in the rest of the article, but it seems to me that the whole section doesn't actually belong in this article. It seems to me it might be better placed in the article Radical behaviorism. The section is a discussion relevant to Skinner's theoretical framework. And, as the first line of the Radical behaviorism article says: "Radical behaviorism is a philosophy developed by B. F. Skinner that underlies the experimental analysis of behavior approach to psychology." In other words, experimental analysis of behavior is the methodology, Radical behaviorism is the underlying theoretical framework. Thoughts? --Gpollock 01:40, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

you make a good point. Where the philosophy stops and where the applied methodology starts is a good question. EAB is not anti-theoretical and to see it as such is to be somewhat superficial. However, the "anti-(hypothetico-deductive)theorizing" is a part of EAB which is derived from Skinner's (Mach derived) Radical Behaviorism. Wikipedia might be creating a clearer bifurcation than which exists elsewhere. --florkle 20:25, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Merging with the article Radical behaviorism

This article should be merged into the article Radical behaviorism. They are the exact same thing. It is the research and philosophy behind Operant conditioning used in Behavior analysis. Who else agrees about merging the articles? I forgot the template format used for merging two articles. Thanks. ATC ^{. Talk} 04:05, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

The experimental analysis of behavior (EAB) is not the same thing as radical behaviorism, on this point I disagree with you, however on the point of whether EAB should be merged with Radical behaviorism I cannot necessarily agree nor disagree. One would have to ask, is there another type of behaviorism besides radical behaviorism, and is there an EAB within that other type of behaviorism? If there is then I would think that the EAB article should address either theories experimental contributions. There are cognitive behaviorists for instance, do they have an experimental field (I do not know- I'm thinking the answer is no though)? There are also methodological behaviorists, I think they do indeed have an experimental field. One goal for the EAB article might try to show the differences between the methodological and radical behaviorists approach to EAB (I am thinking this will be uninteresting though because they will be so similar it would not be worth the effort). One could reasonably imagine that the radical behaviorism article could contain a head for EAB as well as a heading for applied behavior analysis (ABA). One might also ask, is there an argument being made to merge ABA with radical behaviorism?BenjaminSchooley (talk) 16:05, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

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Conditioned or conditional

I used to have a book that said the correct terms were "conditional stimuli" and "unconditional stimuli" when talking about classical conditioning, and that although some books used the terms "conditioned" and "unconditioned", this was a mistranslation of the original Russian used by Pavlov. I note this article still uses the terms "conditioned" and "unconditioned". Vorbee (talk) 07:09, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

Operant Conditioning

I replaced the sentence referring to 'reward' and 'punishment', since as written it was contrary to the spirit of the experimental analysis of behaviour, in which rewards/punishers are defined by their effects on behaviour, rather than the effects on behaviour being predicted by intrinsic characteristics of the consequence. For example, food-delivery can be ineffective in maintaining behaviour in food-sated rats. Likewise, under some circumstances, low levels of shock can come to maintain behaviour, i.e. act as a positive reinforcer. In some humans, certain foods can act as positive reinforcers and be sought, whereas in other humans those same foods will be avoided. Markcymru (talk) 23:20, 22 August 2020 (UTC)