Perspectives on Behavior Science最新文献

Hank Pennypacker's interest in behavioral measurement began early in his career and gradually became the centerpiece of his diverse accomplishments. A review of his focus in the 1960s is followed by a brief summary of the evolution of behavioral measurement practices in applied behavior analysis as it emerged from the field's laboratory history. This examination serves as pretext for a discussion of the contributions of Strategies and Tactics of Human Behavioral Research (Johnston & Pennypacker, 1980), Strategies and Tactics of Behavioral Research (Johnston & Pennypacker, 1993a, 2009), and Strategies and Tactics of Behavioral Research and Practice (Johnston et al., 2020) to emerging matters of behavioral measurement. That discussion focuses on how issues raised by the challenges of applied research and practice have evolved.

Joslyn and Morris (2024) recently published a tutorial on adapting and applying risk ratios to within-subject behavioral data. Newland (2024; this issue) offers a commentary on Joslyn and Morris that expands the discussion of risk ratios and how they are typically applied in group comparison research. He is also critical of the approach described by Joslyn and Morris, and advocates against its use primarily because it differs from the traditional calculation. Although we agree with many of Newland's assertions about the benefits of the traditional approach, we disagree that it is the only method of evaluating relative risk that may be useful to behavior analysts. In this response to Newland, we summarize and respond to his concerns, discuss our own concerns with his perspective, consider variables that may affect the relative utility of the two approaches, and provide concluding remarks.

Mediating one's behavior through covert or overt verbal behavior is a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has had to remember a phone number with no way to write it down, follow a recipe without consulting the cookbook for each step, or solve a math equation without a calculator or pencil and paper. Jointly controlled responding is a type of multiply controlled responding that may provide a behavioral analysis of such mediating responses. Joint control, as we will discuss in detail, involves one or more verbal responses bringing other verbal or nonverbal responses to strength under appropriate controlling conditions. The present article will provide guidance for practitioners on how to apply evidence-based methods to teach jointly controlled responses, provide guidance for development of instructional programming, and suggest future applications for using the concept of joint control.

The effectiveness of behavior-analytic service delivery is likely to depend in part on the process of applying knowledge from the laboratory to a service setting. Therefore, a regular review of the literature is an important part of effective practice. It has been proposed that a review of the literature is one of the pillars of evidence-based practice in applied behavior analysis. An effective review of the literature requires five distinct research literacy skills: (1) efficiently finding relevant research investigations or discussions; (2) accessing a full text copy; (3) reading and evaluating; (4) applying what was read to practice; and (5) staying current. In this paper we apply the Six Boxes Model to delineate behavioral influences and possible barriers to research literacy, suggest potential interventions to improve the research literacy of professional behavior analysts, and identify potential research opportunities in this area.

In this paper, we review some results produced by our research group regarding the role of schedules of reinforcement in social behavior. We discuss data from studies in which we attempted to create conditions in which interdependent gains overlapped with individual reinforcement schedules so that these situations were more or less competitive and conflicting. We argue that normative rules about reinforcement schedules and interdependent reinforcement are crucial for analyzing social behavior since these rules allow us to differentiate the effects of individual and social contingencies or an interaction of both. Our analysis demonstrates that temporal criteria in social episodes may be especially relevant in characterizing social behavior. In these episodes, responding to someone who initiates the social episode (the follower's response under the control of the leader's response) can be characterized as responding in a simple limited hold schedule, or in a variable DRL schedule. Leader and follower behaviors may be united by interdependent reinforcement, but their connection is itself a single schedule of reinforcement.

Operant behavior typically occurs in bouts and pauses. The microstructural analysis of bouts and pauses reveals important and separable information about the physical characteristics of the operant and the motivation behind it. An analysis of interresponse times (IRTs) often reveals a mixture of two exponential distributions. One corresponds to short IRTs within ongoing response bouts, reflecting motor properties of the operant, and the other corresponds to longer intervals between bouts, reflecting the motivation behind the response. Partitioning responses into bout initiations and within-bout responses via this two-mode framework reveals the mechanisms underlying behavior maintenance and change. This approach is used in the fields of neurotoxicology, behavioral pharmacology, and behavioral neuroscience to disentangle the contribution of motivational and motoric variables to the pattern of operant behavior. In this article, we present a primer aimed at providing essential concepts related to the analysis of response bouts and temporal dynamics of operant performance.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1007/s40614-024-00408-2.].

The concept of response strength and the process of strengthening by reinforcement are controversial in terms of their explanatory power. We clarify potential theoretical misconceptions following from a strength-based account such as essentialist thinking and circular reasoning. These problems also arise in the practice of latent variable modeling in psychometrics. To solve these conceptual problems, we discuss the Multilevel Model of Behavioral Selection (MLBS; Borgstede & Eggert, 2021) as an alternative theoretical framework. We use blocking from Pavlovian conditioning as an example to demonstrate how the MLBS framework prevents misconceptions arising from strength-based accounts and how it provides a more parsimonious and coherent explanation of the phenomenon. We illustrate the need for precisely defined and theoretically meaningful concepts and offer a reinterpretation of "strengthening by reinforcement." The reconceptualization in terms of the MLBS renders the concept of response strength superfluous. We conclude by highlighting the importance of theoretical reconsideration, putting aside difficulties that arise when attempting to validate strength by empirical means.

Since the first proposal 50 years ago, numerous experiments have documented how arbitrarily related stimuli can become functionally interchangeable. These studies have sought to understand how different variables can moderate the probability of equivalence class formation. However, the well-established evidence regarding this phenomenon in experimental settings does not necessarily guarantee an understanding about how equivalence relations are produced in natural settings. In typical experiments, experimenters control critical variables to produce equivalence relations, such as, the requirement of proficiency with baseline relations, the number of opportunities to relate two or more stimuli, the efforts to promote stimulus control topography coherent with the experimenter-defined relations, etc. All these variables, however, are not controlled in our daily lives. The present article elucidates how some differences between experimental and natural settings can likely affect how the phenomenon of equivalence relations can occur in noncontrolled, naturalistic environments. Furthermore, we suggest new areas of research to promote the generalization of basic experimental data to contingencies in our daily lives.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1007/s40614-024-00404-6.].