David Eckerman
Queen’s University Belfast
My introduction to Behavior Analysis came as a Hamilton College undergrad followed by a PhD program at Columbia University. Perhaps my best work from this time showed pigeons learning a matching to sample task who were required to make a distinctive observing response for each kind of sample stimulus showed enhanced learning -- a result that supported Cumming and Berryman’s “Coding Hypothesis” proposing that “instructional” control by a sample stimulus is not merely “discriminative" . I’m pleased that this proposal, with help from many investigators has moved forward to the present-day Bi-directional Naming Proposal that when someone can describe whether a procedure is being done well or poorly it helps them carry out that procedure skillfully. My mentors for those years included Bill Stebbins, Bill Cummings, Nat Schoenfeld, and Fred Keller -- to whom I am very indebted. With my shiny new PhD I traveled south in 1966 to Chapel Hill, NC where Marcus Waller had gathered a small crew of Behavior Analysts at the University of North Carolina. There I have enjoyed 59 years of affiliation with colleagues and valued students as we explored principles of response shaping, interactions between reinforcement schedules, and ways of characterizing and simulating reinforcement contingencies. Along the way I have tried to contribute to effective training of behavioral principles and laboratory skills through joining with others to develop computer- based exercises. For about 15 of those years I collaborated with Kent Anger, Bob MacPhail and other behavioral toxicologists. I also spent several years extending my southern wanderings all the way to Brazil where I collaborated with Lincoln Gimenes, João Claudio Todorov and others from Universities in São Paulo and Brasília. A key step for me was joining forces with Professor Roger Ray of Rollins College in 2008. He was a committed inter-behaviorist and a genius at developing useful technology. Along with other collaborators, he and I used his still-active Train-to-Code computer system to teach young ABA practitioners to accurately categorize videotaped examples of well-delivered versus poorly delivered ABA procedures. This helped them improve their procedural integrity when delivering those procedures themselves. We attribute that improvement to the Bi-directional Naming Proposal I mentioned above. We had hope this approach would find an important role in the training and credentialing of good ABA service provision. A hope I still hold dear.
1 Eckerman, DA (1970) Generalization and Response Mediation of a Conditional Discrimination. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. 13, 301-316. -- though another comparison of instructional and discriminative control was offered by David Carter and myself in Carter, DE & Eckerman, DA (1975) Symbolic Matching by Pigeons: Rate of Learning Complex Discriminations Predicted from Simple Discriminations. Science. 187, 662-664.