Reward has been shown to change behavior as a result of incentive learning (by motivating the individual to increase their effort) and instrumental learning (by increasing the frequency of a particular behavior). However, Palminteri et al. (2011) demonstrated that reward can also improve the incidental learning of a motor skill even when…

Every article on stimulus equivalence or derived stimulus relations published in the "Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis" was evaluated in terms of characteristics that are relevant to the development of applied technologies: the type of participants, settings, procedure automated vs. tabletop), stimuli, and stimulus sensory modality; types of…

Response variability, a fundamental characteristic of behavior, may be in some cases an induced effect of reinforcement schedules. Research on schedule-induced response variability has shown that continuous reinforcement results in less variability than intermittent reinforcement schedules. Studies on the effects of intermittency of reinforcement,…

This study examines the possibility that the relational stimulus arising from being imitated serves a reinforcing function. A total of 48 preschool children performed a task in which some neutral stimuli were repeatedly associated either with an adult's matching the subject's behavior or the adult's mismatching the subject's behavior. (Author/GO)

Investigated simultaneous occurrence of emergent stimulus-response relations (functional equivalence) and stimulus-stimulus relations (stimulus equivalence). Trained 4- and 5-year olds to emit specified responses to pairs of stimuli in one setting (original training) and to emit other responses to one member of each pair in another setting…

The effects of different degrees of stimulus organization on subsequent generalization were studied with 120 fourth-grade children. (BRT)

The aim of this study was to investigate the generality and stability of two minimal content measures of response style." (Author)

Research supported by Grants MH-11699-01 and NB-04268 from the U.S. Public Health Service.

Purpose of the present research was to determine whether certain Pavlovian conditioning phenomena occur in a simple probability learning situation. (Authors)

Children and adults were trained and tested on formation of novel simple discriminations and conditional stimulus relations. Subjects who formed these sets were trained and tested on formation of stimulus equivalence classes. A modest majority of children matched directly paired stimuli; a few matched indirectly paired stimuli. All normal adults…

We studied economic choice behavior in capuchin monkeys by offering them to choose between two different foods available in variable amounts. When monkeys selected between familiar foods, their choice patterns were well-described in terms of relative value of the two foods. A leading view in economics and biology is that such behavior results from…