Association for Behavior Analysis International

Humans often solve problems by engaging in a variety of strategies, some of which involve sequences of covert verbal behavior. The purpose of this talk is to discuss how verbal behavior serves to mediate complex performances such as stimulus categorization. Dr. Miguel will present several studies that have directly manipulated verbal behavior to produce both novel verbal and nonverbal behavior such as arbitrary matching, visual categorization, and analogical responding. Evidence for verbal mediation comes from positive performances on complex conditional discrimination tasks after the use of speaker training alone, and also from spontaneous vocalizations on the specific verbal strategies utilized by participants during or after task completion. He will argue that behavior analysts should continue investigating verbal mediation as a problem-solving strategy, especially in applied settings.