Association for Behavior Analysis International

Salient social experiences trigger immediate early gene expression or suppression that are large, long lasting, and critical to the fundamental processes of neuroadaptation. These biologically significant stressors activate cells in the endogenous aminergic and peptidergic systems leading to sensitization as well as tolerance. We examine the hypothesis that this cascade of cellular events is the basis for neural dysregulation leading to out-of-control drug taking. Social stress engenders profound analgesia. The pharmacological tolerance to stress-induced analgesia appears to be based on a pattern of genes expressing specific opioid peptides and their receptors. Social stress also induces sensitization as expressed by an augmented response to psychomotor stimulants, and by inhibited zif268 expression in prefrontal cortical cells and increased zif268 expression in amygdaloid cells. One consequence of stress-induced sensitization is dysregulated cocaine binges. The delayed large increases in alcohol consumption in mice mutants lacking the CRH1 receptor gene highlight the enduring impact of salient experiences in gene expression and in heightened alcohol drinking. Our ongoing work on the neural circuits for social stress and intensely rewarding activities such as compulsive cocaine administration points to considerable overlap between them, and identifies targets for pharmacotherapeutic intervention in stress disorders and drug abuse.

Does the name of this special interest group The Experimental Analysis of Human Behavior, imply that those who analyze the behavior of human animals must organize themselves apart from those who analyze the behavior of nonhuman animals? Is the use of nonhumans in experiments really not relevant to the analysis of the behavior of humans? If so, then something must have changed. Many differences exist, of course, between the behavior of humans and nonhumans humans, for example, cannot fly under their own power but have we really isolated differences in principle, differences that require separate organizations for the study of each? I will try to indicate why I believe this is a serious concern, where the concern comes from, and what, perhaps, might be done to maintain what was once a flourishing bi-directional relation between research with humans and nonhumans, in both basic and applied research.

The purpose of this presentation is to address issues and present data that are relevant to Pivotal Response Treatment and Positive Behavioral Support Interventions for children with autism and their families. Topics will include a discussion of the identification of specific prognostic indicators associated with highly favorable outcomes following intervention; and a discussion of procedures used to conduct interventions in key pivotal areas that can change a previously poor prognosis to a favorable prognosis. The relevance of each of these topic areas will be discussed within the context of behavioral teaching strategies in the developing trend in comprehensive interventions for children with autism.

In the 1980s, Skinner spoke several times on Why we are not acting to save the world. He suggested that the lack of action resulted from the fact that behavior cannot be controlled by future events, and that advice or warnings about the future may not be heeded unless the source is highly reliable and the predicted events are imminent. The problem is related to self-control. For example, the immediate and certain economic advantages of resource exploitation for a few outweigh its apparently remote, uncertain and distributed ecological consequences. Another reason for inaction is the inertia of affluence (McKibben, The End of Nature). Research has shown repeatedly that behavior is more resistant to change in situations with high overall reinforcer rates, regardless of whether all reinforcers are contingent on the target behavior. Thus, in the affluent society of the US, behavioral patterns will be highly persistent even when they are counterproductive in the long run. Potent disrupters are needed to alter behavior in a reinforcer-rich environment. I will consider the disruptive effects of 9/11 on some behavioral patterns that, if unchanged, may bring humankind to a premature end.

Existing medical treatments for many diseases are ineffective. Yet physicians persist in using the best available treatments even when they are known to be essentially worthless and cause considerable harm. Behavior analysis and clinical medicine have many similarities in terms of features of their data but differ markedly in their concepts of evidence. Adoption of behavior analytic concepts facilitate the problem solving needed to maximize clinical outcomes.

Chiding from the local Chamber about doing relevant research shamed Chris into taking on an all Afro-American 6th grade class (Pearley School) described as out of control as a first venture into applied behavior analysis. The presentation describes his unexpected success and how it led to escalating involvement in over 400 business/organizational OBM projects (some more complete than others), a graduate program, some really intricate OBM doctoral applications, and collaboration with truly talented student-researchers. Now, some 35 y later, OBM may be faced with a so-called paradigm shift. Some of Chriss final reflections on this shift will be presented.

Features of development create special circumstances in which aspects of learning are both constrained and given systematic attributes which in turn influence subsequent development. It will be argued that the paucity of sensory input, i.e., the sequential onset of the senses and their relatively limited sensitivity, prevents young organisms from experiencing James buzzing booming confusion and simplifies the task of selective learning. It is proposed that early features of learning provide a scaffolding for subsequent learning. The purpose will be instantiated by examining the manner in which fetal exposure to maternal speech influences hemispheric specialization and subsequent processing of facial information, contributing to the separation of analytic and holistic modes of information processing in the two hemispheres. Suggestive data on the way in which fetal learning of taste preferences by rats come to influence preferences for novel and familiar experiences will also be presented. In addition preliminary data from rabbits that suggests that priming by learning in an early developing system facilitates, or indeed enables, learning in a later developing system will be presented. The foregoing represents an extension of T. C. Schneirlas genuinely interactive position which avoids the largely sterile issue of nature vs. nurture by placing learning and the role of experience in a biological and ecological framework.

While behavior analysis often lays claim to being the science of behavior, and rationalizes this claim by pointing to its singular accomplishments in applied enterprises, behavior analysis occupies an unheralded position among other fields that not only make the same claim, but glean substantially more of societys material and intellectual resources for research, and wield more powerful influence over its cultural landscape. Little scientific progress resulted from the so-called cognitive revolution, and following the Decade of the Brain, organic approaches (with cognitive science tagging along beside) have ascended to favored positions among the behavioral sciences The present paper argues that, in this, the fourth year of the Decade of Behavior and the hundredth anniversary of Skinners birth, behavior analysis can provide a unifying and coherent paradigm for a comprehensive theory of behavior that includes exciting new findings from a range of other disciplines. It calls for more thorough education of behavior analysts in areas like evolutionary neurobiology and ethology, concerted efforts to forge collaborative alliances with researchers and intellectuals in these other fields, and an attempt to frame our knowledge of behavioral relations in a vocabulary that acknowledges and embraces important contributions made by other areas.

Since its inception in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, modern science has been characterized by a rich variety of activities. Researchers experiment in the laboratory, quantify functional relations, build theories and models, test hypotheses, estimate parameters, refine old techniques and devise new ones, review manuscripts, etc. By means of these activities, the scientist moves constantly from Observation to Theory and from Theory to Observation. The bridge connecting the two domains is, broadly speaking, the scientific method. I will elaborate on the scientific method with the aim of singling out for analysis the subset of scientific activities related to conceptual investigations. Through examples from the study of Learning and Behavior (e.g., models and theories of time and number discrimination, choice, and schedule performance), I will attempt to characterize conceptual investigations, describe some of their types and purposes, and identify their limitations. If scientific progress requires not only the colligation of facts but also the clarification of concepts, then standard methodology courses and textbooks must replace a narrow, algorithmic view of method, with a wider view, a view in which the varieties of scientific research in general and conceptual investigations in particular receive their proper weight.

Certainly the biggest impediment to the development of a complete behavior analysis of human behavior lies in the problem of accounting for generalized responding: that is, accounting for responding appropriately to hitherto untrained stimuli. While behavior analysis can account for primary or concrete generalization, that is, generalization along a physical dimension, it has not yet developed a parsimonious and complete account of generalized responding based on abstractions; that is generalization responding based on relations between stimuli. These relations consists of two sorts. The first sort involves relations between words and objects, while the second consists of relationships between objects themselves. Thus the first sort involves questions such as how words only trained to be emitted as names (objectword responding) can, without further training, serve to select objects (word-object responding). The second sort of relation involves performances as abstract as seeking an object in response to a given description, and then, upon failing to find the specified object, modifying the description in a systematic fashion so as to select some other object bearing the same relation as the original (e.g., find the next largest object). In this paper we shall see how the simple notion of joint control serves to provide a parsimonious behavioral account of these and other seemingly conceptual performances..