The ABCs of Behavior Analysis An Introduction to Learning and Behavior A. Charles Catania 2017 Sloan Publishing Cornwall on Hudson, NY 12520 Contents Preface for Student Readers vii Preface for All Readers ix Part I. Introduction 1. Learning and Behavior 1 2. A Behavior Taxonomy 8 Part II. Behavior Without Learning 3. Evolution and Development 18 4. Motor and Sensory Systems 27 5. Elicited and Emitted Behavior 38 Part III. Learning Without Words: Consequences 6. Consequences of Responding: Reinforcement 47 7. Reinforcers as Opportunities for Behavior 58 8. Reinforcement, Free Reinforcement, and Extinction 67 9. Consequences of Responding: Punishment 74 10. Consequences of Responding: Escape and Avoidance 83 Part IV. Learning Without Words: Operant Classes 11. Operants: The Selection of Behavior 91 12. The Structure of Operants 101 13. Motivating Variables and Reinforcer Classes 109 Part V. Learning Without Words: Contingencies 14. Parameters of Reinforcement: Schedules and Delays 119 15. Discriminated Operants: Stimulus Control 131 16. Conditional Discrimination and Stimulus Classes 145 17. Sources of Novel Behavior 156 18. Behavior Synthesis 168 v vi • CONTENTS Part VI. Learning Without Words: Conditioning 19. Respondent Behavior: Conditioning 181 20. Operant-Respondent Interactions: Emotion 191 Part VII. Learning with Words: Verbal Behavior 21. Social Learning 198 22. Words as Stimuli and Responses 205 23. Antecedents and Consequences of Words 215 24. Contact of Verbal Behavior with the Environment 223 25. Verbal Behavior Conditional on Verbal Behavior 235 Part VIII. When Verbal and Nonverbal Behavior Interact 26. Verbal Governance 241 27. Prejudice as Verbally Governed Discrimination 254 28. Verbal Function: Coordinations among Classes 263 Part IX. Remembering and Knowing 29. Remembering 272 30. Knowing 284 Part X. Conclusion 31. Applied Behavior Analysis 295 32. Learning and Behavior Revisited 305 Appendices 317 Glossary 325 References 351 Acknowledgements and Notes 374 Index 375 Preface for All Readers This book started as a brief outline tentatively entitled A Primer of Behavior Analy- sis. One of its antecedents was George Reynolds’ Primer of Operant Conditioning, published by Scott, Foresman in 1968. That book ran to 130 text pages plus sup- porting material and brought together the basic concepts of the fi eld later to be known as behavior analysis. In those days primer was pronounced to rhyme with trimmer, befi tting a book that’s supposed to be short; nowadays it’s sometimes pronounced like rhymer. My earlier book, Learning, had grown longer over successive editions and had become more a graduate than an undergraduate text. I’d often thought about a brief version that could function as George Reynolds’ book once did. But we know much more now than we did then, so I’m happy to have ended up with a bit more than 300 text pages plus supporting material. Of course it could have been much shorter, but that would have made it impersonal and far more abstract. I hope readers will fi nd I’ve struck a reasonable balance among concise presentations of basic concepts, discussions of relevance, concrete examples and illustrations of applications. I can’t date when I fi rst drafted the outline, but I stopped worrying about pro- nunciation when length made it obvious the Primer title was inappropriate. The main title, The ABCs of Behavior Analysis, captures the basics while also highlight- ing the three-term contingency: Antecedents–Behavior–Consequences. The sub- title, An Introduction to Behavior and Learning, provides a reminder of the linkage between behavior and learning. The essence of learning is creating new behavior, and that encompasses much of what we behavior analysts do. Three features seemed especially important as the manuscript evolved. First, it had to represent behavior analysis as a discipline in its own right rather than as a component of psychology: psychology has become an umbrella designation for a variety of approaches only some of which are compatible with behavior analysis, and behavior analysis encompasses many topics treated by psychology as separate domains. Second, selection by consequences had to be its organizing principle: in both its methods and underlying assumptions, behavior analysis has more in com- mon with biology than with most varieties of psychology and cognitive science. Third, it could not be limited to the basic nonverbal processes: it would assume no one unfamiliar with at least the rudiments of the science of verbal behavior could truly be counted as a behavior analyst. These three prerequisites made the new work inevitably parallel in many ways the organization of my earlier Learning. Anyone comparing the respective tables ix Chapter 2 A Behavior Taxonomy Science…is becoming the study of organisms. — Alfred North Whitehead A behavior taxonomy is a vocabulary for orga- tion corresponds most closely to what happens nizing the various procedures and phenomena in the Discussion section. of behavior. Please don’t expect explanations of Behavior of course occurs in natural settings behavior based on formal laws. Instead, think as well as artifi cial ones arranged by an experi- of a systematic classifi cation of behavior based menter. We startle in response to an unexpected on its origins: given any example of behavior, loud noise whether produced by accident on where did it come from? The taxonomy won’t be the street or deliberately in a lab. For that rea- exhaustive, because we can’t anticipate every- son, these terms are applied both to artifi cial thing we’ll run into. Behavior analysis remains procedures and their outcomes and to natural work in progress, but we can at least aim for a sequences of events. For example, Chesapeake, descriptive system that organizes the phenom- our cat , has learned he often gets fed after going ena we’ve begun to know while not excluding to his feeding dish in the kitchen. It hardly mat- those we’ve yet to study. ters whether I deliberately trained his behavior We study the relation between environmental or it came about as a matter of course during events and the organism’s behavior by chang- routine feedings. Either way, being fed was a ing the environment and observing how this frequent consequence of going there. It’s con- affects what the organism does. In the analysis venient to call such circumstances procedures of behavior, procedures or operations are what or operations whether or not I arranged them the experimenter or the environment does or explicitly. arranges, and outcomes or processes are the result- The simplest procedure is to observe behavior: ing changes in behavior. A convenient analogy just watch. We discover what an organism can comes from medicine, where the surgical opera- do. But we have no control over events when we tion, a procedure, is what the physician does to simply observe, so we may not be able to draw the patient, and the processes that follow, such conclusions about the causes of behavior. To learn as changes in circulation, respiration and so on, more we must intervene, and the simplest inter- are the outcomes. I’ll usually favor procedure over vention is to present stimuli. A more complicated operation and outcome over process, but within intervention is to arrange the environment so the each pair the terms are usually interchangeable. organism’s behavior can change it or, in other If you’re familiar with the standard sections words, so behavior has consequences . Once behav- of experimental papers you’ll recognize this ior has consequences it may occur more or less distinction as paralleling the difference between often, when we may sometimes call the respec- the Method section, which describes the pro- tive outcomes reinforcement and punishment . cedures and other details of an experiment, We haven’t exhausted the possibilities. We and the Results section, which describes the can arrange things so stimuli signal the pre- obtained data. We can also interpret changes in sentation of other stimuli or so stimuli signal behavior once we’ve observed them; interpreta- the opportunity to produce consequences. We 8 Chapter 4 Motor and Sensory Systems .…he has ascribed the process to internal sounds and assumed that the ear produces a sound within, like a bell…. but how should we hear this internal sound itself? —Theophrastus criticizes explanations of hearing (in Stratton, 1917) Selection shaped the bodies of organisms based at least safe to assume that response systems on how those bodies behaved. Among verte- evolved before sensory ones. An organism that brates, selection operated on muscular and skel- can’t do anything about what it sees gains no etal and neural structures allowing them to eat advantage by seeing. Some organisms remained and mate and get around via walking, running, immobile but others began to twitch and squirm. swimming, fl ying, climbing, tunneling, slither- Some were passively moved by ocean currents ing, and so on (arthropods and cephalopods but others anchored themselves to a site. Still and organisms in other phyla do these things others developed cilia and fl agella. The organ- too, but in other ways). Sensory systems were isms from which we are descended developed advantageous because without them behavior ways to get from one place to another. would have been inappropriate to the settings The most primitive patterns of movement in which organisms found themselves. As their were probably driven primarily by eliciting touch and taste evolved, they could respond dif- stimuli. Bright light elicits random movement ferentially to things they contacted. With smell in an insect larva. In what’s called a kinesis (plu- and vision and hearing they could respond to ral: kineses), it moves until by chance it reaches more distant stimuli. I could have started here darkness; then it stops (Fraenkel & Gunn, 1961; with sensory systems, because discriminative Loeb, 1918/1973). We fi nd few larvae in the light stimuli come before responses in the three-term but many in the dark, such as under the rotting contingency.