In his article, the author claimed that studies of operant variability that use a lag-"n" or threshold procedure and measure the obtained variability through the change in U value fail to provide direct evidence that variability is an operant dimension of behavior. To do so, he adopted Catania's (1973) concept of the operant, which takes the…

Barba's (2012) paper is a serious and thoughtful analysis of a vexing problem in behavior analysis: Just what should count as an operant class and how do people know? The slippery issue of a "generalized operant" or functional response class illustrates one aspect of this problem, and "variation" or "novelty" as an operant appears to fall into…

Serving as Rachlin's teaching assistant for his graduate course on animal learning in 1973 determined the direction of the author's career, which has been to build computer models and robots based mostly on the equations from that course and related ones. These artificial beings behave and learn very much like animals, and creating them forces a…

Skinner's definition of verbal behavior, with its brief and refined versions, has recently become a point of controversy among behavior analysts. Some of the arguments presented in this controversy might be based on a misreading of Skinner's (1957a) writings. An examination of Skinner's correspondence with editors of scientific journals shows his…

A series of experiments on operant variability by Neuringer and colleagues (e.g., Neuringer, 1986, 2002; Page & Neuringer, 1985) have been repeatedly cited as showing that behavioral variability can be reinforced by making reinforcement contingent on it. They showed that the degree of variability in pigeons' eight-peck sequences, as measured by U…

The experimental analysis of behavior (EAB) is in trouble. Financial support for basic operant-conditioning research is difficult to obtain; teaching and research positions in colleges and universities are few; and bright undergraduates join other fields for graduate study. One reason for the difficulty is that EAB basic research does not focus…

This paper describes and analyzes B. F. Skinner's coauthoring practices. After identifying his 35 coauthored publications and 27 coauthors, we analyze his coauthored works by their form (e.g., journal articles) and kind (e.g., empirical); identify the journals in which he published and their type (e.g., data-type); describe his overall and local…

The topic of stimulus control is too broad and complex to be traceable here. It would probably take a two-semester course to cover just the highlights of that field's evolution. The more restricted topic of equivalence relations has itself become so broad that even an introductory summary requires more time than we have available. An examination…

Despite the central status of avoidance in explaining the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders, surprisingly little behavioral research has been conducted on human avoidance. In the present paper, first we provide a brief review of the empirical literature on avoidance. Next, we describe the implications of research on derived relational…

This article reviews evidence from basic and translational research with pigeons and humans suggesting that the persistence of operant behavior depends on the contingency between stimuli and reinforcers, and considers some implications for clinical interventions. (Contains 4 figures.)

In this article, I argue that a class of religious behaviors exists that is induced, for prepared organisms, by specific stimuli that are experienced according to a response-independent schedule. Like other schedule-induced behaviors, the members of this class serve as minimal units out of which functional behavior may arise. In this way, there…

Joint attention (JA) initiation is defined in cognitive-developmental psychology as a child's actions that verify or produce simultaneous attending by that child and an adult to some object or event in the environment so that both may experience the object or event together. This paper presents a contingency analysis of gaze shift in JA…