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Closure

      While wondering what records would look like should a rat choose to move towards - or away from - a lever, I saw something I could not find words for, though I knew it was true. I stared at the points where I supposed the animal begins pressing the lever:  the curve will slope upwards.

But at the same time, the rat's movement will cease.

So how can reinforcement increase and decrease behavior - in the same place - simultaneously?

Never before had I confronted this question.  I was lost for words in my virtual Skinner box.

Distraught, I went out and watched people on the street: they enter a cafe, sit and start eating; they walk along and halt in order to look through a shop window. The same everywhere: at one and the same time reinforcement stops and starts behavior. I wasn't dreaming but something was wrong.  Some days later, came the solution: it depends on one's focus: movement of visible parts as distinct from the whole individual! Skinner, par excellence. [1]

Returning to the cumulative records in my make-believe lab, this became plain:

looking at a paw or a beak, responses are observed to accelerate. Whereas, watching the entire animal, reinforcement clearly stops the rat in its track.  Furthermore, looking at what subjects obtain as they halt, anyone may infer motivation from the audio-visual sign or signal for the onset and offset of reinforcement. As in nature, so in these extended lab settings: animals go for what they want and inform onlookers as to attraction from afar ... reinforcement from a distance!   

The normal and typical win-win situation akin to mutually reinforcing social relationships.

Though they didn't come quickly, those were sudden insights. [2]  And scientists will certainly gain by exploring conditioning with spaced keys and spaced stimuli to symbolise remote reinforcement.

Despite - or because of - unsettled nature-nurture issues, searching for primary controlling sources inside the head or the body continues, unabated. This twists cause and effect, rendering us insensitive to reality.

And this hinders conceptual unity among human beings, including scientists from many disciplines.

Behavior analysts can defend radical behaviorism. Even now, I feel myself tensing over misconceptions due to the lingual traps into which humans repeatedly fall. [3] In 1938, Skinner argued the point:

A Set of Terms

In approaching a field ... defined for purposes of scientific descriptions we meet at the start the need of a set of terms. Most languages are well equipped in this respect but not to our advantage .... The important objection to the vernacular in the description of behavior is that many of its terms imply conceptual schemes. I do not mean that a science of behavior is to dispense with a conceptual scheme but that it must not take over without careful consideration the schemes which underlie popular speech. The vernacular is clumsy and obese; its terms overlap each other, draw unnecessary or unreal distinctions, and are far from being the most convenient in dealing with the data. They have the disadvantage of being historical products, introduced because of everyday convenience rather than that special kind of convenience characteristic of a simple scientific system. It would be a miracle if such a set of terms were available for a science of behavior, and no miracle has in this case taken place. There is only one way to obtain a convenient and useful system and that is to go directly to the data.

Almost 50 years later a miracle did take place: I blithely designed data in a bigger animal laboratory.

This left me no choice but to think sentences with individuals as the grammatical subjects.

My way out of all this has to be through sincere verbal clarity, rhyme, rhythm and reason.

But in 1984, I might as well have been asked to fly to the moon as insist, animals manifest mental activities and display how they feel, in public.  Still, by this time the vernacular comes more easily, and then it can be surprisingly communicative in face-to-face conversation on psychology.

People know they see objects look smaller as they recede and loom larger as they come closer.

No teleology! Simply a matter of seeing things from a distance, not so different from planning a meeting, printing a calendar or predicting the weather from the state of the clouds and the winds.

Nowadays, I introduce behavior researchers as experts who think beyond the box, in a great scientific [4] breakthrough.  Not merely because they see things from another perspective; but also because "thinking outside the box" is the essence of radical behaviorism: the philosophy that says learning, teaching, habits and all, depend on the environment which can influence individuals, organs and molecules.

So with Skinner's blessing, I'm not about to give up just when I see my language improving. I feel as though I transversed the globe and hope this is what we refer to as closure, or closing a circle. 

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Men act upon the world, and change it, and are changed in turn by the consequences of their action.

Together with the biblical statement, Skinner's grand opening to VERBAL BEHAVIOR is even more awesome to my secular mind. Contrary to popular opinion, scientists and believers in God wonder alike. A recent example is the 2012 transit of Venus; the planet appears as a tiny dark disc moving across the face of the sun ... and this view impressed thousands and thousands of people dispersed over the earth.

I long for the day when the world comes to appreciate Pavlov and Skinner as pioneer scientists, who taught animals to attribute meaning to sights seen and sounds heard.

Pavlov made history by affecting the dog's consciousness and physiological activities.

Skinner recorded experimental control over movement of visible anatomical parts and brought the animals to a voluntary standstill.

Both men carried out their research agenda with single individuals, one by one.

Individuality need not be glorified nor suppressed, or pushed aside or ignored.

Factual descriptions of how people speak and respond to each other, suffice for dissemination.

We don't react in ways perennially determined by any personal genetic lineage. Human spontaneity is a virtue when people make up their mind, on the spur of a moment, to initiate socialisation.

Persons and animals are not unfeeling machines nor thoughtless robots. Live creatures know when to push something away or pull it towards them, instinctively.

Here is the marvel of normal and natural conditioning: even in unfamiliar surroundings, living species -individual  members - may adapt rapidly and survive. I don't believe human power is total or unlimited.  But let us correct error [5] and prolong cooperative interaction for sustaining many more healthy relationships on Earth. The Law of the Jungle includes more than an inexorable food chain. What we say about prey and predator, is true.  Yet let us remember the social life in families, groups and herds where collaboration for  migration and emigration, and care for the injured, plus the feeding of the young, also take place.

As long as mutual attraction is more frequent than killing, the survival of species is facilitated.

The life of organisms is recorded by scientists who satisfy their curiosity and discover laws of nature, hopefully for the good of mankind.  Many creatures demonstrate a special interest in unfamiliar objects and unexplored neighbourhoods.

Perhaps other species also accept loss and change with more equanimity than we do.

Anyhow, it is not possible for people to affect each other's behavior without also affecting each other's brain and physiological systems, by means of words - in speech, and script, and song;

and also in whispers which make people listen very intently with interest and pleasure.

Thus Skinner concludes THE BEHAVIOR OF ORGANISMS: AN EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS.
I feel privileged in closing this blog with his legacy.

Pavlov's and Skinner's and Sidman's work [6], may well provide the empirical foundation to support the theory and practice of complementary medicine. [7]

____________________________

Notes

1. "By behavior, then, I mean simply the movement of an organism or of its parts.." (1938)

     This may explain why Skinner encouraged the spacious laboratory as a fruitful suggestion.

 2. "Insight is a psychological term that attempts to describe the process in problem solving when a previously unsolvable puzzle becomes suddenly clear and obvious. Often this transition from not understanding to spontaneous comprehension is accompanied by an exclamation of joy or satisfaction, an Aha! moment."

       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka effect

     

3. 'Reifying behavior', as if behavior were literally a thing with size, shape, and outline. In reality, it is people and other organisms who behave and misbehave.  To argue the opposite is to dehumanise human endeavour - not to mention, contradict scientists' values and principles.    

4. 'Scientific' in the sense of causal or functional as in 'functional relation' or 'causal explanation'.

5. " Individuals not using the insight process are more likely to produce partial, incomplete responses."

     This shows the division between the cognitive and the behavioristic approaches to psychology and causation.  I didn't 'use insight'; it came after I saw something odd that I thought should be describable.

And so it is. Consensus on what persons do or say is elementary in applied behavior analysis, and it is part of the high observer-reliability (recorded directly) in time and in place.

6. "There is no way to overstate the importance of Murray Sidman's contributions to applied behavior analysis."  William H. Ahearn, The New England Center for Children and Western New England College.

I resonate to Dr. Ahearn's opening sentence in his discussion: Sidman on Aversive Control (2011)

European Journal of Behavior Analysis,12, 327-329

7.  I refer to physiological states caused by external variables to which people are exposed daily:
the stimulation and the reinforcement schedules that might sustain mental and physical health. 

        

July 7, 2012

August 26, 2012

Modified on 28 October 2012 at 8:00