Stimuli, reinforcers, and private events

Radical behaviorism considers private events to be a part of ongoing observable behavior and to share the properties of public events. Although private events cannot be measured directly, their roles in overt action can be inferred from mathematical models that relate private responses to external stimuli and reinforcers according to the same quantitative relations that characterize public operant behavior. This approach is illustrated by a model of attending to stimuli and to anticipated reinforcers in delayed matching to sample, in which the probabilities of attending are related to reinforcer rates by an expression derived from research on behavioral momentum.