Psychological Bulletin, , — Schumacher, E. Virtually perfect time sharing in dual-task performance: Uncorking the central cognitive bottleneck. Psychological Science, 12 , — Shull, R. Response rate viewed as engagement bouts: Effects of relative reinforcement and schedule type. Skinner, B. A case history in scientific method. In Cumulative record enlarged ed. Chapter Google Scholar. Operant behavior. In Contingencies of reinforcement: A theoretical analysis pp.
Wallace, A. Driving to work. Spiro Ed. Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Correspondence to William M. Reprints and Permissions. What counts as behavior?
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Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Skip to main content. Search SpringerLink Search. Abstract Because the definition of behavior changes as our understanding of behavior changes, giving a final definition is impossible. References Alcock, J. Google Scholar Aparicio, C. Google Scholar Baum, W. Google Scholar Catania, A. Google Scholar Davison, M.
Google Scholar Dawkins, R. Google Scholar Gilbert, T. Google Scholar Hall, G. Google Scholar Herrnstein, R. Google Scholar Levitis, D. Google Scholar Nevin, J. Chapter Google Scholar Skinner, B. Google Scholar Wallace, A. Google Scholar Download references. Baum Authors William M. Baum View author publications. Rights and permissions Reprints and Permissions. About this article. The total reserve of an operant does not pour out at once as soon as opportunity arises; the rate of elicitation is relatively slow and presumably depends upon a similar subsidiary reserve exhausted at each single occurrence.
We may regard the emission of an operant response as occurring when the subsidiary reserve reaches a critical value. A second response cannot occur until the subsidiary reserve has been restored to the same value. The rate of restoration is again a function of the total reserve. I shall not need to refer again to the subsidiary reserve. It is relatively unimportant in the case of respondent behavior, because only a few respondents are phasic. In operant behavior the notion is carried adequately by that of a rate.
The notion of a reserve and of the varying proportionality between it and the strength is something more than a mere definition of dynamic properties in terms of reflex strength, It is a convenient way of bringing together such facts as the following examples of which will appear later : there is a relation between the number of responses appearing during the extinction of an operant and the number of preceding reinforcements that is to say, the number of responses that can be obtained from the organism is strictly limited by the number that has been put into it ; changes in drive do not change the total number of available responses, although the rate.
The Interaction of Reflexes An actual reduction in the number of variables affecting an organic system such as is achieved by turning off the lights in a room is to be distinguished from a hypothetical reduction where the constancy or irrelevance of a variable is merely assumed. Now, the kind of variable represented by the stimulus may be controlled and even in many cases eliminated. Many of our techniques of analysis are devoted to this end.
The reflex as an analytical unit is actually obtained in practice. The unit is a fact, and its validity and the validity of the laws describing its changes do not depend upon the correctness of analytical assumptions or the possibility of a later synthesis of more complex behavior.
The preceding laws have applied to a single unit isolated in this practical way. They are valid so far as they go regardless of the fate of the unit when other stimuli are allowed to enter. We are under no obligation to validate the unit through some kind of synthesis. But a description of behavior would be inadequate if it failed to give an. In addition to processes involving reflex strength, a description of behavior must deal with the.
Interaction may be studied in a practical way by deliberately combining previously isolated units and observing their effect upon one another. In this way we obtain a number of laws which enable us to deal with those larger samples of behavior sometimes dubiously if not erroneously designated as 'wholes.
The effects of interaction are in part topographical and in part intensive. Two or more responses which do. The responses may be under the control of separate stimuli as when the patellar tendon is tapped and a light is flashed into the eyes at the same time, so that both the knee-jerk and contraction of the pupil occur simultaneously or of a single stimulus.
The law seems to hold without exception for respondents but requires some qualification elsewhere. We cannot combine operants quite so deliberately because we cannot elicit them. We can only present discriminative stimuli simultaneously and build up appropriate drives. When the. But this will occur only if the drive is strongif the machinist is working rapidly.
Usually responses make way for each other and occur in some sort of serial order, even when there is little or no topographical overlap. When two reflexes overlap topographically and the responses are incompatible, one response may. The notion of prepotency has been extensively investigated by Sherrington The effect is not inhibition as defined above because both stimuli control the same effector.
Various theories of inhibition have appealed to prepotency. The simultaneous elicitation. If one reflex is much stronger, little or no trace of the weaker may be observed, and the case resembles that of prepotency. When the two exactly balance, either no response is observed, or, as is often the case in systems of this sort, a rapid oscillation of greater or less amplitude appears. When the strengths differ slightly a partial or slower response occurs in the direction of the stronger.
A familiar example is the operant behavior of a squirrel in approaching a novel. There are two responsesone toward the object, the other away from it. If either is relatively strong, the resulting behavior is simply approach or withdrawal. If approach is strong, but withdrawal not negligible, a slow approach takes place. When the two balance as they often do at some point in the approach , a rapid oscillation may be observed. A respondent example, which has been. When one response is wholly obscured, the effect must be distinguished from inhibition, as in the case of prepotency, on the grounds that both stimuli here control the effector.
Two responses showing some topographical overlap may be elicited together but in necessarily modified forms. In playing the piano while balancing a wine glass on the back of the hand, the usual movements of the fingers are modified by the balancing behavior. The result is a mechanical interaction of the musculature and resembles the external modification of a response as when one plays with a weight attached to the hand.
In the former case the usual form of the behavior is modified by other reflexes, in the latter by an external force. Most of the normal behavior of an organism shows blending of this sort. Many respondent examples are given by Magnus When two reflexes have the. Spatial summation differs from temporal summation in raising a topographical problem. A reflex is defined in terms of both stimulus and response.
Two stimuli define separate reflexes even though the response is the same. In spatial summation we are dealing with the interaction of reflexes rather than with the intensification of the stimulus of a single reflex. This is obvious when the stimuli are distantly located or in separate sensory fields. A familiar example may easily be demonstrated on infants.
A movement of the hand before the eyes, and a slight sound, neither of which will evoke winking if presented alone, may be effective in combination. As is most frequently the case in dealing with summation, the example applies. When the stimuli are in the same sensory field, and especially when they are closely adjacent, this formulation in terms of interaction may seem awkward, but it is, I believe, in harmony with the actual data and is demanded by the present system.
The fundamental observation is that the response to the combined stimulus is stronger than that to. The result should be included under algebraic summation, taken literally, but a separate class is usually set up for the case in which the responses not only involve the same effectors but utilize them in the same direction. Excellent examples may be found in the work of Magnus on the multiple control of posture 61, A distinction between spatial summation and facilitation may be pointed out.
In facilitation the strength of a reflex changes according to a dynamic law, where the defining operation is the presentation of a stimulus. The relation between the stimulus and the change in. The single condition which distinguishes facilitation from summation is that the facilitating stimulus must not of itself be capable of eliciting the response. If this distinction were not maintained, the two phenomena would be indistinguishable.
In summation we cannot regard one stimulus as raising the strength of the relation between the second and the response because of the observed direct effect upon the response of the first.
In facilitation, with this effect lacking, we must formulate the change as an example of a dynamic law. Facilitation involves one reflex and a stimulus, but summation involves two reflexes. Two other laws which come under the broad heading of interaction have a slightly different status, but may be listed here.
The response of one reflex may constitute. The stimuli may be proprioceptive as in the serial reaction of throwing a ball or produced externally by a change in the position of receptors as when the organism looks to the right and then responds to a resulting visual stimulus or reaches out and then seizes the object which touches its hand. The Law of Chaining is considered again in the following chapter. The dynamic changes are limited to those which affect the reserve.
An example of induction is the fatigue of a flexion reflex from one locus of stimulation through repeated elicitation of a reflex from another locus.
This is not the meaning of induction given by Sherrington or Pavlov. In Sherrington's usage the term refers both to summation from adjacent stimuli immediate induction and to the 'post-inhibitory' strengthening of a related reflex successive induction.
Pavlov adopts the term from Sherrington but uses only the second meaning. The Generic Nature of the Concepts of Stimulus and Response The preceding system is based upon the assumption that both behavior and environment may be broken into parts which retain.
If this assumption were not in some sense justified, a science of behavior would be impossible. But the analysis of behavior is not an act of arbitrary subdividing. We cannot define the concepts of stimulus and response quite as simply as 'parts of behavior and environment' without taking account of the natural lines of fracture along which behavior and environment actually break.
If we could confine ourselves to the elicitation of a reflex upon a single occasion, the problem would not arise. The complete description of such an event would present technical difficulties only; and if no limit were placed upon apparatus, an adequate account of what might be termed the stimulus and the response could in most cases be given.
We should be free of the question of what we were describing. But a reproducible unit is required in order to predict behavior, and an account of a single elicitation, no matter how perfect, is inadequate for this purpose. It is very difficult to find a stimulus. The identifiable unit is something more or something less than such a completely described entity. In the traditional field of reflex physiology this problem is dealt with by main force.
An investigation is confined to a reflex in which. It is easier to restrict the stimulus than the response, since the stimulus. In this way a sort of reproducibility is devised,. For many purposes a preparation of this kind may be an adequate solution of the problem of reproducibility. Some degree of restriction is probably always required before successful experimentation. But severe restriction must be rejected as a general solution, since it implies an arbitrary unit, the exact character of which depends upon the selection of properties and does not fully correspond to the material originally under investigation.
The very act of restriction suppresses an important characteristic of the typical reflex, and it is, moreover, not a practical solution that can be extended to behavior as a whole. An example of the problem is as follows. In the relatively simple flexion reflex, the exact location of the stimulus is unimportant; a correlated response may be demonstrated even though the stimulus is applied elsewhere within a rather wide range.
The form of energy also need not be specific. Similarly, on the side of the response we cannot specify the exact direction of the flexion if we have not simplified, or, having simplified, we cannot justify the selection of one direction as against the other. So far as the mere elicitation of the reflex is concerned, most of the properties of the two events in the correlation are, therefore, irrelevant.
It will be seen, then, that in stating the flexion reflex as a unit the term 'stimulus' must refer to a class of events, the members of which possess some property in common, but otherwise differ rather freely, and the term 'response' to a similar class showing a greater freedom of variation but also defined rigorously with respect to one or more properties. The correlation that is called the reflex is a correlation of classes, and the problem of analysis is the problem of finding the right defining properties.
This is obvious in the case of the operant since the correlation with a stimulus does not exist, but it holds as well for respondent behavior. In order to show this it will be necessary to review the procedure of setting up a reflex. The control over the response is almost exclusively that of specification.
We have the refusal of all responses not answering to the criteria that we have selected. When the defining. One stimulus may be enough to demonstrate the sort of correlation sought for, but either deliberately or through lack of control the properties are usually varied in later elicitations and other members of the stimulus class thus added. Subsequently the defining property of the stimulus is identified as the part common to the different stimuli found to be effective.
There must be defining properties on the sides of both stimulus and response or the classes will have no necessary reference to real aspects of behavior. If the flexion reflex is allowed to be defined simply as a reflex having for its response a class defined by flexion, there is nothing to prevent the definition of an infinite number of reflexes upon similar bases. For example, we could say that there is a reflex or class of reflexes defined by this property: that in elicitation the center of gravity of the organism moves to the north.
As soon as this relation is apparent our tentative responseclass begins to take on experimental reality as a characteristic of the behavior of the organism' Since we are completely free in this first choice, it is easy to select a wrong property, but this is soon detected in our inability to show a correlation with a single stimulus-class.
However, a certain freedom in specifying the response remains. By including other properties in our specification we may set up less comprehensive classes, for which correspondingly less comprehensive stimulus-classes may be found.
For example, if we begin with 'flexion in a specific direction only,' we obtain a stimulus-class embracing a smaller stimulating area. There is nothing to prevent taking such a restricted unit at 4 The impossibility of defining a functional stimulus without reference to a functional response, and vice versa, has been especially emphasized by Kantor Within the class given by a first defining property, then, we may set up subclasses through the arbitrary restriction of other properties.
This procedure yields a series of responses, generated by progressive restriction, each member of which possesses a corresponding stimulus in a more or less parallel series. We approach as a limit the correlation of a completely specified response and a stim-. At this stage the unit is unpractical and never fully representative. Usually the first restrictions are designed to protect the defining property by excluding extreme cases.
They clarify the definition and. In general, as we progressively restrict, the descriptive term assigned to the reflex comes to include more and more of the two events and is consequently so much the more useful.
At the same time a greater. If we now examine the dynamic properties of this series of correlations, we find that with progressive restriction the dynamic changes in strength become more and more regular. The changes in question are those affecting the reserve, not the proportionality of reserve and strength. If we are measuring fatigue, for example, we shall not obtain too smooth a curve if our stimulus varies in such a way as to produce at one time one direction of flexion and at another time another; but as we restrict the stimulus to obtain a less variable response, the smoothness of the curve increases.
This is essentially a consequence of the Law of Induction. In such a process as fatigue or extinction we are examining the effect of one elicitation upon another following it. We look for this effect to follow the main rule of induction: it will be a function of the degree of community of properties. In a completely restricted preparation we should, therefore, have a sort of complete induction, since two successive elicitations would be identical.
Each elicitation would have its full effect, and the curve for the dynamic change would be smooth. But if we are using only a partially restricted entity, successive elicitations need not have identically the same properties,. The generic nature of the concepts of stimulus and response is demonstrated by the fact that complete induction obtains and the dynamic changes therefore reach an optimal uniformity before all the properties of stimulus or response have been fully specified in the description and respected in each elicitation.
I am not prepared to demonstrate this fact in the case of respondent behavior because the present degree of orderliness of the dynamic changes is inadequate, but in operant behavior the same argument holds. The appeal to dynamic laws is especially significant in the case of operant behavior because the other kind of operation that establishes the properties of a class the presentation of a stimulus is lacking.
At a qualitative level the definition of an operant depends upon the repetition of a sample of behavior with greater or less uniformity. Before we can see precisely what a given act consists of, we must examine the changes it undergoes in strength.
Here again we merely specify what is to be counted as a response and refuse to accept instances not coming up to the specification. A specification is successful if the entity which it describes gives. Since the laws that apply here are those that affect the reserve, the proof that the response is a class of events and that any given instance possesses irrelevant.
Many examples will be described later which concern the behavior of a rat in pressing a lever. The number of distinguishable acts on the part of the rat that will give the required movement of the lever is indefinite and very large.
They constitute a class, which is sufficiently well-defined by the phrase 'pressing the lever. It maintains itself or changes in lawful ways. But the responses which contribute to this total number-per-unit-time are not identical. They are selected at random from the whole class that is, by circumstances which are independent of the conditions determining the rate. The members of the class are quantitatively mutually replaceable in spite of their differences.
The Behavior of Organisms 38 that is, if the response had been restricted through further specification , the smoothness of the resulting curves would have been decreased. The curves would have been destroyed through the elimination of many responses that contributed to them.
The set of properties that define 'pressing a lever' is thus uniquely determined; specifying either fewer or more would destroy the consistency of the experimental result. It may be added that in the case of conditioned operant behavior the defining property of a class is exactly that given by the conditions of the reinforcement. If the reinforcement depended, for example, upon snaking the response with a certain group of muscles, the class would change to one defined by that property.
Such a class might vary in other ways, but by restricting the reinforcements further and further we could. The present point is that when the reinforce-. It is true that the non-defining properties are often not wholly negligible and that the members of classes are consequently not exactly mutually replaceable. On the side of the response, the data will not show this in most cases because of the present lack of precision.
But it is certain that there are outlying members of a class which have not a full substitutive power; that is to say, there are flexions and pressings that are so unusual because of other. It ought to be supposed that lesser differences would be significant in a more sensitive test.
If we should examine a large number of responses leading to the movement of the lever, most of them would be relatively quite similar, but there would be smaller groups set off by distinguishing properties and a few quite anomalous responses.
It is because of the high frequency of occurrence of the similar ones. On the side of the stimulus, small differences may be demonstrated, since we here control the values of the non-defining properties and may mass the effect of a given property.
Thus, it can be shown that in the flexion reflex fatigue from one locus of stimula-. Here particular stimuli have been segregated into two groups on the basis of the property of location, and the relevance of the property to the course of a secondary change appears. In this case we are justified in speaking of different reflexes from the two loci. Similarly, in the example of pressing a lever the reinforcement is made in the presence of an indefinitely large class of stimuli arising from the lever and the surrounding parts of the apparatus.
It is possible to control some of the properties of these members. For example, the lever may be made to stimulate either in the light or in the dark, so that all properties which arise as visible radiation can be introduced or removed at will. It will later be shown that these are not wholly irrelevant in the subsequent extinction of the operant. In either of these cases if we had allowed the stimulus to. It is only by separating the stimuli into groups that we can show their lack of complete equivalence.
Once having shown this, we can no longer disregard the importance of the property, even in the absence of grouping. This demonstration of the generic nature of the stimulus and response does not pretend to go beyond the limits set by the present degree of experimental precision, but its main features are too well. A practical consistency in the dynamic laws may appear at such a rela-. It would be idle to consider the possibility of details that have at present no experimental reality or importance.
It may be that the location of the stimulus to flexion or the forces affecting the organism as the lever is pressed are somehow significant up to the point of complete specification; but we are here interested only in the degree of consistency that can be obtained while they are still by no means completely determined. This consistency is so remarkable that it promises very little improvement from further restriction.
The preceding argument may be summarized as follows. A prep-. The increase in precision gives a greater authority to the statement of a correlation, which is desirable; but it will not help in deciding upon a unit. It leads ultimately to a completely restricted entity, which is usually unreproducible and otherwise unpractical, so that.
The second criterion yields, on the other hand, a unit which is by no means arbitrary. The appearance of smooth curves in dynamic processes marks a unique point in the progressive restriction of a preparation, and it is to this uniquely determined entity that the term reflex may be assigned. In deciding upon this definition we choose simplicity and consistency of data as against exact reproducibility as our ultimate criterion, or perhaps we temper the extent to which exact reproducibility is to be demanded and use the consistency of the data in our defense.
This would be good scientific method if we were not forced to it for other reasons. To insist upon the constancy of properties that can be shown not to affect the measurements in hand is to make a fetish of exactitude. It is obvious why this has so often. The procedure recommended by the present analysis is to discover the defining properties of a stimulus and a response and to express the correlation in terms of classes.
The usual expedient has been. In a successful case all properties seem to be relevant because they invariably occur upon all occasions. It is almost as if, faced with the evident irrelevance of many properties, the reflex physiologist had invented the highly restricted preparation to make them relevant. In giving a complete account of an arbitrarily rAstricted preparation, we describe at the same time too little and too much. We include material that is irrelevant to the principal datum, so that part of the description is superfluous, and we deliberately ignore the broader character of the stimulus and the response.
The complete description of one act of pressing the lever would have very little usefulness, since most of the information would be irrelevant to the fact of emission, with which we are chiefly concerned, and would tell us nothing about the set of properties that yield a consistent result. Some amount of restriction is practically indispensable. It has the merit of holding a defining property constant even though the property has not been identified.
Until we have discovered a defining property, it is necessary to resort to restriction to guarantee ultimate validity.
And since it is often difficult to designate defining properties clearly, especially where extreme values of other properties interfere, some measure of precautionary restriction is usually necessary. It is often not obvious that it is being used. We should find it very difficult to define the class 'pressing a lever' without considerable precautionary restriction of essentially nondefining propertiesconcerning the size of the lever and so on. The use of a uniform lever from experiment to experiment is in itself a considerable act of restriction and is apparently necessary to assure a consistent result.
Freedom from the requirement of complete reproducibility broadens our field of operation immeasurably. In particular the behavior of the intact organism is made available for study with an expectation of precision comparable with that of the classical spinal preparation. Indeed, if smoothness of the dynamic changes is to be taken as an. Evidence of this will be forthcoming later. The generic nature of stimuli and responses is in no sense a justification for the broader terms of the popular vocabulary.
No property is a valid defining property of a class until its experimental reality has been demonstrated, and this rule excludes a great many terms commonly brought into the description of behavior. The Behavior of Organisms 42 hides when confronted with a dog, it may be said in an uncritical extension of the terminology of the reflex that the dog is a stimulus.
In order to make these terms validly descriptive it is necessary to define the classes to which they refer. It must be shown what properties of a stimulus give it a place in the class 'dog' and what properties of a response make it.
The resulting classes must be shown to be correlated experimentally and it ought also to be shown that dynamic changes in the correlation are lawful. It is not at all certain that the properties thus found to be significant are those now supposedly referred to by the words 'dog' and 'hiding' even after allowing for the inevitable vagueness of the popular term. The existence of a popular term does create some presumption in favor of the existence of a corresponding experimentally real concept, but this does not free us from the necessity of defining the class and of demonstrating the reality if the term is to be used for scientific purposes.
It has still to be shown that most of the terms. The analysis has not been pressed to the point at which orderly changes emerge. This restriction upon the use of the popular vocabulary is often not felt because the partial legitimacy of the popular term frequently results in some experimental consistency.
The experimenter is more likely than not to hit upon experimentally real terms, and he may have some private set of properties resulting from his own. The word 'hiding' may always be used by him in connection with events having certain definite prop5 It will appear later that this example is actually a discriminated operant rather than a respondent.
But it is a mistake for him to suppose that these properties are communicated in his use of the popular term. If no more accurate supplementary specification is given, the difficulty will become apparent whenever his experiments are repeated.
This raises a problem in epistemology, which is inevitable in a field of this sort. The relation of organism to environment must be supposed to include the special case of the relation of scientist to subject matter.
If we contemplate an eventual successful extension. It is necessary to raise this epistemological point in order to explain why it. The reason is that such terms are in themselves responses of a generic sort: they are the responses of the population of which the experimenter is a member. Consequently, when the organism under investigation fairly closely resembles man for example, when it is a dog ; the popular term may be very close to the experimentally real entity.
The experimenter may hit immediately upon the right property of the stimulus, not because he has manipulated it experimentally, but because he himself reacts in a measure similarly to the dog.
On the other hand if the organism is, let us say, an ant or an amoeba, it is much more difficult to detect the real stimulus-class without experimentation. If it were not for this explanation, the partial legitimacy of the popular term would be a striking coincidence, which might be used and indeed has been used as an argument for the admission. In insisting that no amount of reality in the popular terms already examined will excuse us from defining a new term experimentally if it is to be used at all, I am rejecting any such process.
The rule that the generic term may be used only when its experimental reality has been verified will not admit the possibility of an ancillary principle,. The Direction of Inquiry So far as scientific method is concerned, the system set up in the preceding chapter may be characterized as follows.
It is positivistic. It confines itself to description rather than explanation. Its concepts are defined in terms of immediate observations and are not given local or physiological properties. A reflex is not an arc, a drive is not the state of a center, extinction is not the exhaustion of a physiological substance or state. Terms of this sort are used merely to bring together groups of observations, to state uniformities, and to express properties of behavior which transcend single instances.
They are not hypotheses, in the sense of things to be proved or disproved, but convenient representations of things already known. As to hypotheses, the system does not require them. It is often objected that a positivistic system offers no incentive to experimentation. The hypothesis, even the bad hypothesis, is said to be justified by its effect in producing research presumably even bad research , and it is held or implied that some such device is usually needed.
This is an historical question about the motiva-. There are doubtless many men whose curiosity about nature is less than their curiosity about the accuracy of their guesses, but it may be noted that science does in fact progress without the aid of this kind of explanatory prophecy. Much can be claimed for the greater efficiency of the descriptive system, when it is once motivated. Granted, however, that such a system does possess the requisite.
A fact is a fact; and the positivistic system does not seem to prefer one to another. Hypotheses are declared to solve this problem by directing the choice of facts. This is a narrow view of a descriptive science. The mere accumulation of uniformities is not a science at all. It is necessary to organize facts in such a way that a simple and convenient description can be given, and for this purpose a structure or system is required. The exigencies of a satisfactory system provide all the direction in the acquisition of facts that can.
Although natural history has set the pattern for the collection of isolated bits of curious behavior, there is no danger that a science of behavior will reach that level. The research to be described in this volume has been dictated by the formulation of the system described in the preceding chapter, and the general direction of inquiry may be justified by appeal to the system in the following way.
There is a lack of balance, at the present time, in favor of respondent as against operant behavior. This is explicable on historical grounds. The discovery of the stimulus as a controlling variable was the first great advance in reducing behavior to some kind of ordera discovery that naturally encouraged research in bringing to light stimulus-response relationships.
The investigation of the lower reflexes which began with Marshall Hall and reached its height with Sherrington established the reflex as a valid concept and set the pattern for analogous research on higher behavior. Pavlov's discovery of the conditioned reflex of Type S emerged from the study of unconditioned alimentary respondents, and the greater part of the work on conditioning has kept to this type. The early contention that the concepts applicable to spinal respondents and to conditioned reflexes of Type S could be extended to behavior in general has delayed the investigation of operant behavior.
There is, therefore, good reason to direct research toward obtaining a better balance between the two fields, especially since the greater part of the behavior of the intact organism is operant. An important historical phase of the investigation of respondents was topographical. New reflexes were discovered and named. But with the extension of the field through the discovery of conditioning and the realization that reflexes could be endlessly multiplied, the isolation and naming of reflexes lost much of its importance.
No comparable phase has tended to arise in the operant field. The general topography of operant behavior is not important, because most if not all specific operants are conditioned. The Behavior of Organisms 46 suggest that the dynamic properties of operant behavior may be studied with a single reflex or at least with only as many as are needed to assure the general applicability of the results.
If this is true, there should be no incentive to 'botanize. The only topographical problem to be considered is the legitimacy of defining a response in terms of certain properties. This is the problem of a unit of behavior, discussed at the end of the preceding chapter, which extends in the present work principally to the field of discrimination and to the necessity of formulating a discrimination in terms of related reflexes.
The problem may be treated conveniently with a single operant. The principal problems in the field of behavior lie in the direction of the laws of reflex strength, and this is the chief burden of.
The remaining part of the fieldthe interaction of separate reflexes-4 have felt could not except for induction and chaining be successfully investigated until the laws of strength applying to the single reflex were better known. F Skinner Limitadong pagsilip - Science And Human Behavior B. F Skinner Snippet view - Mga pangkaraniwang termino at parirala abulia aggressive anxiety appears appropriate arise aversive consequences aversive stimulation avoid B. Nisbett , Lee Ross Snippet view - Tungkol sa may-akda B.
Impormasyon sa aklat. F Skinner Simon and Schuster , - mga pahina 0 Mga Review The psychology classic—a detailed study of scientific theories of human nature and the possible ways in which human behavior can be predicted and controlled— from one of the most influential behaviorists of the twentieth century and the author of Walden Two. Stress, Appraisal, and Coping Richard S.
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