Operants Were Never "Emitted," Feeling Is Doing, And Learning Takes Only One Trial: A Review Of B. F. Skinner's Recent Issues In The Analysis Of Behavior

This final collection of Skinner's papers was intended for the professional, although other readers will find much of interest. The first five chapters are devoted to what Skinner called “theoretical issues” and include clear presentations of his positions on “feelings” and on the “self” as an apparent agent of volition. Skinner skillfully discusses thinking, the origins of cognitive-mediational theories, and a favorite topic: the similarity of processes occurring in the histories of species and of individuals. The next four chapters cover what he called “professional issues,” including the often-misunderstood philosophy known as radical behaviorism as well as the operant aspects of behavior therapy and attempts to influence educational practices. He seemed disappointed in the lack of acceptance of programmed learning methods and pessimistic about the possibility of improving education practices. This pessimism was evident in the final section, “personal issues,” in which he expressed doubt that the powerful and self-serving forces of government, business, and religion will ever permit the changes that could be wrought by the application of behavior analysis to the great problems of society. Two other chapters in the last section will be useful to historians who are curious about the influence of logical positivism on Skinner's thinking (apparently there was not much influence) and to sophisticated readers who are interested in Skinner's retrospective consideration of his work.     

Intrusions and perseverations

Twenty-two subjects with presumed senile dementia of the Alzheimer's type (SDAT), twenty-two with dementia other than SDAT, twenty with aphasia, and seventeen healthy controls over 50 years of age were examined for intrusions and perseverations. Perseverations were defined as the immediate inappropriate repetition of a prior response whereas intrusions were defined as the inappropriate repetition of prior responses after intervening stimuli. Intrusions and perseverations occurred in demented and aphasic subjects, but were rare in controls. Intrusions occurred most often in SDAT or Wernicke aphasia, but also in dementia other than SDAT. Intrusions were not correlated with dementia severity. Intrusions are a useful sign of dementia, but they cannot be considered pathognomonic of SDAT. They appear to arise when subjects are unable to access correct responses from long-term memory and instead substitute erroneous responses selected from short-term memory. Perseverations were most common in the Wernicke aphasics and subjects with dementia due to communicating hydrocephalus. Although frontal lobe dysfunction is prominent in communicating hydrocephalus, it is absent in cases of Wernicke aphasia. Thus, we have confirmed prior suggestions that perseveration can occur in the absence of frontal lobe injury. Failure to self-monitor speech as well as an inability to change mental set probably plays an important role in the genesis of perseverations. There was no statistically significant correlation between dementia severity and number of perseverations. Low correlations were found between intrusions and perseverations suggesting that these seemingly similar behaviors are distinct and are probably produced by separate neuropsychological mechanisms.     

Residual ability to use grapheme-phoneme conversion rules in phonological dyslexia

A case of acquired phonological dyslexia is described (P.M.). The patient was encouraged to read nonwords by analogy with real words, i.e., by changing phonemes in real words to produce pronounceable nonwords. P.M. was able to perform this task suggesting that he retained some ability to use grapheme-phoneme conversion rules. On the basis of P.M.'s performance an additional connection in Morton's logogen model is postulated.     

The logical and empirical bases of conservation judgements

It is argued that conservation judgements are based on a particular combination of logical necessity and empirical belief. The empirical belief is that a given transformation will not alter a particular quantity (Elkind's conservation of identity). The logical aspect is a transitive deductive argument containing an initial equivalence of two quantities and the conservation of identity belief as premises which lead to the conclusion of maintained equivalence (Elkind's conservation of equivalence). In two experiments, it is shown that conservation of identity beliefs can be manipulated in subjects who have long since developed the capacity for transitive deductive inference. Untrained 10 year olds were unaware of how sublimation acts to alter certain quantities over particular transformations of shape. And untrained adults incorrectly believed that both the area and perimeter of a closed figure would be conserved over transformations which elongated the figure. Both groups of subjects could be trained in the correct conservation of identity beliefs and this affected their conservation of equivalence judgements in predicted ways. It is suggested that the locical aspect of conservation is developmentally stable and that the empirical aspect varies widely across problems and individuals because of its dependence on relevant experience.     

Inconsistent discipline of aggression in young boys

Two studies assessed the effects of interagent, inconsistent discipline on aggression in young boys. One agent responded to hitting behavior with verbal disapproval while another agent responded with verbal approval. In Experiment 1, the frequencies of hitting responses of first- and second-grade boys were examined under four schedules of adult reactions: (1) consistent disapproval; (2) consistent ignoring: (3) consistent approval; and (4) inconsistent discipline (approval from one agent and disapproval from the other). Aggressive responding was least frequent when met with consistent disapproval whereas the frequency of hitting responses in the inconsistent discipline condition was not different than that in the consistent approval and ignore conditions. In Experiment 2, the frequencies of hitting responses were examined under a schedule of consistent disapproval following a brief schedule of either: (1) inconsistent discipline; (2) consistent approval; or (3) consistent ignoring. Hitting behavior during consistent disapproval was greatest following a period of inconsistent discipline and least frequent following a history of consistent ignoring. These findings replicate the results of correlational field studies of the relation between inconsistent discipline and aggression in boys. In addition, these experimental studies demonstrate a causal link and the direction of effects between these variables.     

Children's discrimination of oblique lines.

In three experiments using delayed-matching tasks with 5-year-old children (one of which also included 7-year-olds) no support was found for the hypothesis that children code for line orientation using a match-mismatch strategy. The hypothesis that errors in discrimination of obliques can be attributed mainly to confusion over the left-right direction of tilt was rejected in a fourth experiment. It was concluded that young children do not spontaneously encode orientation in relation to a matching environmental cue and that there is no evidence that memory for the direction of obliquity is inferior to memory for the degree of obliquity.     

Three types of schemata in children's recall of cohesive and noncohesive text

Children, ranging in ages from 7.3 to 9.6 years, were identified according to the type of schemata structure they used to recall picture sequence events. These children were then required to recall several written text passages representing four different conditions: (1) theme first paragraphs, (2) theme final paragraphs, (3) paragraphs with no theme but having thematic structure, and (4) paragraphs with no theme and no thematic structure. It was found that the manner and the amount of the child's recall were a function of how the child's schemata structure interacted with a given paragraph structure. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the generally unquestioned assumption that only one “ideal” text grammar is needed to describe children's schemata for processing test.     

Stimulus-reinforcer and response-reinforcer relations in the control of conditioned appetitive headpoking (“goal tracking”) in rats

Experiment 1 studied the effect of several Pavlovian appetitive conditioning procedures on rats' headpoking into a food tray (goal tracking). The procedures included forward delay conditioning, CS-alone extinction, differential conditioning, and simultaneous compound conditioned inhibition training. In general, the headpoke behaved in all of these treatments much like a Pavlovian CR; however, one could also say that the headpoke behaved like an adventitiously reinforced operant for which the CS was an S^D. Experiment 2, therefore, used the differential-nondifferential technique (E. Gamzu & D. R. Williams, Science, 1971, 171, 923–925), and Experiment 3 used an omission technique (F. D. Sheffield, in W. F. Prokasy, Ed., Classical conditioning, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1965; D. R. Williams & H. Williams, Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 1969, 12, 511–520), to try to separate the role of stimulus-reinforcer and response-reinforcer relations in controlling the headpoke. These techniques proved inadequate. The results of Experiment 2 could be given either operant or Pavlovian interpretations. Those of Experiment 3 showed that headpoking is dominated by response-reinforcer, rather than by stimulus-reinforcer, relations when the two compete but forced no conclusion about which dominates when the two act together as in acquisition. Implications for pigeon autoshaping are discussed.