The Role of Atomic Repertoires in Complex Behavior

Evolution and reinforcement shape adaptive forms and adaptive behavior through many cycles of blind variation and selection, and therein lie their parsimony and power. Human behavior is distinctive in that this shaping process is commonly "short circuited": Critical variations are induced in a single trial. The processes by which this economy is accomplished have a common feature: They all exploit one or more atomic repertoires, elementary units of behavior each under control of a distinctive stimulus. By appropriate arrangements of these discriminative stimuli, an indefinite number of permutations of atomic units can be evoked. When such a permutation satisfies a second contingency, it can come under control of the relevant context, and the explicit arrangement of discriminative stimuli will no longer be required. Consequently, innovations in adaptive behavior can spread rapidly through the population. A consideration of atomic repertoires informs our interpretation of generalized operants and other phenomena that are otherwise difficult to explain. Observational learning is discussed as a case in point.     

Edward L. Thorndike: the selectionist connectionist

From the very outset of his work, Thorndike allied himself with the Darwinian proposition that complex phenomena can arise as the cumulative effects of a selection process, here the process envisioned by the law of effect. Thorndike's selectionist approach, when combined with his connectionism, laid the foundation for a synthesis of behavior analysis and neuroscience.     

Herbert Spencer's contributions to behavior analysis: a retrospective review of principles of psychology

Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology (1855, first edition) was regarded by his contemporaries, including William James and John Dewey, as a major contribution to what was then a very new discipline. In this book he first expounded his ideas about both evolution of species and how behavior of the individual organism adapts through interaction with the environment. His formulation of the principle that behavior changes in adaptation to the environment is closely related to the version of the law of effect propounded some years later by Thorndike. He can thus be seen as the first proponent of selectionism, a key tenet of behavior analysis. He also explicitly attacked the then prevailing view of free will as being incompatible with the biologically grounded view of psychological processes that he was advocating, and thus put forward ideas that were precursors of B. F. Skinner's in this important area of debate.     

Some Implications of a Behavioral Analysis of Verbal Behavior for Logic and Mathematics

The evident power and utility of the formal models of logic and mathematics pose a puzzle: Although such models are instances of verbal behavior, they are also essentialistic. But behavioral terms, and indeed all products of selection contingencies, are intrinsically variable and in this respect appear to be incommensurate with essentialism. A distinctive feature of verbal contingencies resolves this puzzle: The control of behavior by the nonverbal environment is often mediated by the verbal behavior of others, and behavior under control of verbal stimuli is blind to the intrinsic variability of the stimulating environment. Thus, words and sentences serve as filters of variability and thereby facilitate essentialistic model building and the formal structures of logic, mathematics, and science. Autoclitic frames, verbal chains interrupted by interchangeable variable terms, are ubiquitous in verbal behavior. Variable terms can be substituted in such frames almost without limit, a feature fundamental to formal models. Consequently, our fluency with autoclitic frames fosters generalization to formal models, which in turn permit deduction and other kinds of logical and mathematical inference.     

Behavior analysis and neuroscience: Complementary disciplines

Behavior analysis and neuroscience are disciplines in their own right but are united in that both are subfields of a common overarching field—biology. What most fundamentally unites these disciplines is a shared commitment to selectionism, the Darwinian mode of explanation. In selectionism, the order and complexity observed in nature are seen as the cumulative products of selection processes acting over time on a population of variants—favoring some and disfavoring others—with the affected variants contributing to the population on which future selections operate. In the case of behavior analysis, the central selection process is selection by reinforcement; in neuroscience it is natural selection. The two selection processes are inter‐related in that selection by reinforcement is itself the product of natural selection. The present paper illustrates the complementary nature of behavior analysis and neuroscience through considering their joint contributions to three central problem areas: reinforcement—including conditioned reinforcement, stimulus control—including equivalence classes, and memory—including reminding and remembering.     

Thorndike's Legacy: Learning, Selection, And The Law Of Effect

This introduction to a symposium on the centennial of Edward L. Thorndike's 1898 monograph on animal intelligence briefly considers the origins of his law of effect and the influence of Darwin's selectionism. It also provides the background for an unfinished book review by William W. Cumming of a biography of Thorndike. The review places in historical context Thorndike's position both on psychology as a science of behavior and on the vocabulary of that science.     

THE THIRD WAY OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES: BEYOND SUI GENERIS RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND THE POSTMODERNISTS

This essay advocates dual-inheritance theory for the renewal of Religious Studies. Not by Genes Alone , by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd (2005), presents this approach in an admirably clear manner. To make my case, I survey the development of Religious Studies since the Enlightenment, with special attention to the American context. The historical survey brings us to the dawn of the twenty-first century, where Religious Studies is often unnecessarily limited to sui generis Religious Studies and its postmodern critics. Neither approach engages regnant Darwinian theoretical frameworks of gene-culture coevolution productively. In this context, I situate the contributions of dual-inheritance theory as presented by Richerson and Boyd and offer examples of its utility for progress in Religious Studies, its ability to open cooperation across disciplinary boundaries, and its salutary demystification of religion as a culturally unique and coherent phenomenon. I conclude by addressing concerns scholars of religion might entertain regarding the issue of reductionism and how an emergent science of religion might contribute to the traditional concerns of religion-and-science dialogue as it has evolved in the English-speaking context.     

REFLECTIONS ON BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY: A SELECTIVE REVIEW OF EVOLUTION SINCE DARWIN—THE FIRST 150 YEARS. EDITED BY M. A. BELL,D. J. FUTUYAMA,W. F. EANES, & J. S. LEVINTON

This review focuses on parallels between the selectionist sciences of evolutionary biology and behavior analysis. In selectionism, complex phenomena are interpreted as the cumulative products of relatively simple processes acting over time—natural selection in evolutionary biology and reinforcement in behavior analysis. Because evolutionary biology is the more mature science, an examination of the factors that led to the triumph of natural selection provides clues whereby reinforcement may achieve a similar fate in the science of behavior.     

A selectionist approach to reinforcement.

We describe a principle of reinforcement that draws upon experimental analyses of both behavior and the neurosciences. Some of the implications of this principle for the interpretation of behavior are explored using computer simulations of adaptive neural networks. The simulations indicate that a single reinforcement principle, implemented in a biologically plausible neural network, is competent to produce as its cumulative product networks that can mediate a substantial number of the phenomena generated by respondent and operant contingencies. These include acquisition, extinction, reacquisition, conditioned reinforcement, and stimulus-control phenomena such as blocking and stimulus discrimination. The characteristics of the environment-behavior relations selected by the action of reinforcement on the connectivity of the network are consistent with behavior-analytic formulations: Operants are not elicited but, instead, the network permits them to be guided by the environment. Moreover, the guidance of behavior is context dependent, with the pathways activated by a stimulus determined in part by what other stimuli are acting on the network at that moment. In keeping with a selectionist approach to complexity, the cumulative effects of relatively simple reinforcement processes give promise of simulating the complex behavior of living organisms when acting upon adaptive neural networks.     

Effects of response variability on the sensitivity of rule-governed behavior

Two experiments examined the relation between response variability and sensitivity to changes in reinforcement contingencies. In Experiment 1, two groups of college students were provided complete instructions regarding a button-pressing task; the instructions stated “press the button 40 times for each point” (exchangeable for money). Two additional groups received incomplete instructions that omitted the pattern of responding required for reinforcement under the same schedule. Sensitivity was tested in one completely instructed and one incompletely instructed group after responding had met a stability criterion, and for the remaining two groups after a short exposure to the original schedule. The three groups of subjects whose responding was completely instructed or who had met the stability criterion showed little variability at the moment of change in the reinforcement schedule. The responding of these three groups also was insensitive to the contingency change. Incompletely instructed short-exposure responding was more variable at the moment of schedule change and was sensitive to the new contingency in four of six cases. In Experiment 2, completely and incompletely instructed responding first met a stability criterion. This was followed by a test that showed no sensitivity to a contingency change. A strategic instruction was then presented that stated variable responding would work best. Five of 6 subjects showed increased variability after this instruction, and all 6 showed sensitivity to contingency change. The findings are discussed from a selectionist perspective that describes response acquisition as a process of variation, selection, and maintenance. From this perspective, sensitivity to contingency changes is described as a function of variables that produce response variability.