Drossell, Claudia - Early experimentalists such as Arzin,Ferster, Sidman and many more, had a vision of exploring laboratory-derived operant principles to clinical practice settings. Syetematically exploring the possibilities inherent in behavior analytic assessments and interventions, these pioneers and their students markedly raised the standards of care, most notably in areas li mited to mere custodial or restraint-based services at the time, where progress had been deemed beyond...

Gottlieb, Daniel - Last year, I talked about the bredth of the Pavlovian process before discussing the different types ofPavlovian stimuli and how they might not all be equally amenable to intervention. This year, my focus is on how Pavlovian processes may be a driving forcein a number of areas in which people are failing to properly regulate, leading to such problems as obesity, drug addiction, immune system dysfunction, anddisorders of attention. these problems are likly the result of...

Friman, Patrick - Interpreting common child behavior problems as evidence of psychopathology is routine in mainstream psychology. The practice is so widespread that when investigators fail to obtain clinically significant levels of behavior problems, as indexed by standard scores on assessment instruments, they usually (almost always) reanalyze their data in terms of raw scores and then argue that any statistically significant elevation is evidence of pathology. Four representative common...

Kukekova, Anna - Domestication as a special form of evolution offers valuable insights into how genomic variation contributes to complex differences in behavioral and morphologocal phenotypes. The genetics-centered view of the domestication is supported by experimental selection of farm-based foxes (Vulpes vulpes).that begun at the Russian Institute of Cytology and Genetics in the 1950s. Selection of foxes for either tame or aggressive behavior, has yeilded two strains with markedly...

Gottlieb, Daniel - Bringing Pavlov's Science to Behavior Analysis - Recent research in Pavlovian conditioning has led to an increasingly expansive view of Pavlovian processes and a growing appreciation for their sophistication. Unfortunately, there has been very little progress in applying this knowledge toward the promotion of mental and physical well-being. it is clear, however, that Pavlovian processes are more important for more than phobias and drug relapse. Their influence extends to a...

Green, Leonard. and Myerson, Joel. - IImpulsivity, Imaptience, and Risk Taking: A Discounting Perspective - People discount the value of delayed or uncertain outcomes, and the same mathematical function describes both delay and probability discounting. The degree to which individuals discount is thought to reflect how impulsive they are. from this perspective, steep discounting of delayed outcomes (which fails to maximize long-term welfare) and shallow discounting of probabilistic outcomes...

Donahoe, John - Reinforcement: History and Current Status - The following topics will be among those discussed; (1) implications of Darwinian thinking (selectionism) for selection by reinforcement, (2) the problem of “circularity” and its treatment by the probability- differential (Premack) and response-deprivation (Timberlake & Allison) hypotheses, (3) the Rescorla- Wagner model of conditioning and its operant-respondent distinction as viewed by UPR, (6) implications of UPR for...

Pitts, Raymond – Behavioral Mechanisms of Drug Action: What Are They, How Will We Know One When We See It, and How Might Quantitative Models Help? - Over 45 years of research in Behavioral Pharmacology has shown quite clearly that environmental variables are powerful determinants of the behavioral effects of drugs. Unfortunetly, providing a coherent, behavior-analytic framework within which to characterize the roles of environmental context, behavioral history, schedule of reinforcement,...

Machado, Armando – An Invitation to Probability With Spreadsheet Simulations – In this tutorial I will review some fundamental ideas concerning the theory of probability. I will concentrate on the Poisson, Exponential, and Gamma random variables, review their properties, show how they are interrelated, illustrate their uses in modelling behavior and learning, simulate them in a spread sheet. I will conclude with some notes concerning the Poisson Process and apply in timing and concurrent choice.

Domjan, Michael – Pavlovian Conditioning: It Is Not About the CR, But About Modification of a Behavioral System- Pavlovian conditioning is typically thought of in terms of the common example of a dog salivating to a cue that occurs reliably before the delivery of meat powder. Conditioned salivation (the conditioned response or CR) was viewed ad reflecting an association of the cue and the meat powder, and Pavlovian conditioning became a favorite method of scientists whose primary interest was...

Nevin, John – Behavioral Models of Conditional Discrimination: Detection and Matching to Sample - Quantitative Models of conditional discrimination performance, based on well-established behavioral processes such as matching to relative reinforcement, effects of reinforcement on resistance to change, and stimulus generalization, can account for many findings of studies with nonhuman animals in signal-detection and matching-to-smaple paradigms. This turotial will provide a guided tour of...

Rachlin, Howard – A Behavioral Analysis of Altruism - Alturistic acts may have been defined as costly acts that confer economic beneifts on others. (In Behavioral term: punished acts that reward others.) In prisoner's dilemma games, with human players, a significant number of players behave altruistically; their behavior benefits each of the other players but is costly to them. I propose that such altruism is based on a straightforward balancing of discounted costs to themselves againmst...

Lattal, Kennon – Facets of Operant Extinction – Operant extinction is a cluster of procedures, all of which reduce the targeted response often while generating other responses. Procedures for reducing operant responses that have been laleled extinction include the removal of the reinforcer, removal of the response-reinforcer relation, and rendering ineffective the reinforcer used to establish the responses. These different procedures are differentially effective in both eliminating the...

Blampied, Neville – Single-Case Research Designs: Useful Tools for 21st Century Applied Research - The tutorial will outline some contemporary challenges facing applied psychological research, e.g., establishing the effectiveness as well as the efficacy of interventions. It iwll then review the histiry of the development of the standard model of psychological research, based on Fisher's Null-hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST), and will present some critical evidence indicating that HST...

Stephens, Mia – Exploration, Visualization and Data Analysis with JMP - JMP, developed in the late 1980's by a SAS Institute, is desktop software for data exploration and analysis. JMP is a stand alone product, with point-and-click graphical user interface. However, JMP can also be integrated with SAS, providing an easy to use and flexable front end. Intuitive, interactive and graphical, JMP lets researchers move quickly from numbers to meaningful statements about findings and results. JMP...

Odum, Amy – Delay Discounting: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How? - Delay discounting is the decrease in the present value of an outcome when its receipt is remote in time. Many problematic behaviors (e.g., drug action, obesity, gambling) can be conceptualized as problems of extreme delay discounting. Delay discounting has been extensively studied in humans and non-humans, using a variety of procedures, populations, and outcome types. Most (but as yet not all) of the basic findings in the...

Macphail, Robert – Environment, Behavior and Pollution: Quantifying Risk - This tutorial will describe past and current studies on behavior in the field of environmental toxicology, an area of inqury that has a remarkably longer history than generally recognized. Toxicology bears much in common with Pharmacology in that both fields investigate the effects of chemicals on living organisms, organs or tissues. Whereas pharnracology most often focuses on therapeutic or abused agents,...

Fowler, Stephen – Dynamics of Response: Uninterrupted Measurement of the Behavior Stream – This tutorail ill show 1) how the behavior analytic reach of operant conditioning methods can be increased by examining force, duration, and time integral of force (effort) of individual operant responses and 2) will describe a non-video method (i.e., force-plate actometer as the floor of an operant chamber) for tracking and otherwise quantifying behaviors that occur during interresponse times....

Davison, Michael – What “Reinforcers” do to Behavior, II: Signposts to the Future - Over the last few years, it has become increasingly evident that the process of reinforcement may well have been misnamed and misunderstood. Events like contingent food for a hungry animal do not simply increase or maintain the probability of responses that they follow, they don't strengthen behavior. Rather, they may act as signposts to future events, guiding behavior through the learned physical and temporal...

Shook, Gerald - The Behavior Analyst Certification Board and the Behavior Analyst Profession - The tutorial will explore the development of the Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB) including the growth of the BACB since its inception a decade ago; the process used by the BACB to develop degree, coursework, and supervised experience requirements to qualify for the examinations; the development of the examination content and construction of the examinations; the spread of certification...

Baum, William – Dynamics of Choice - This tutorial examines the centrality of choice to the understanding of behavior. By reexamining the concept of reinforcement and relating it to behavioral allocation, the dynamics of choice may be seen as the process of shifting allocation. Skinner's assertion that the law of effect is not a theory was correct, even if his theory of reinforcement was incorrect. Research of the last forty years suggests that the events called "reinforcers" affect behavior...

Stout, Steven – Cue Competition in Pavlovian Conditioning - In recent decades researchers in the field of Pavlovian conditioning have focused on how conditioned responding to a target conditioned stimulus (CS) is affected by the presence of non-target CSs. A common observation is that target and non-target CSs compete for control over conditioned responding in the sense that their response potentials are in-verse1v correlated. In the three and a half decades since the theoretical model of...

Myerson, Joel – Cognitive Aging: A Behavior Theoretic Approach - As people get older, their behavior on many different kinds of tasks tends to become slower, less accurate, and more variable. I will describe a theoretical framework that focuses purely on the behavior emitted by younger and older adults performing response-time and memory span tasks. Our findings support some distinctions in the cognitive psychology literature but not others, and our approach provides empirical bases for...

Shahan, Timothy - Conditioned Reinforcement - The notion that stimuli associated with primary reinforcers may themselves come to function as reinforcers has served a central role in the analysis of behavior and its applications outside the laboratory. However, a long history of research has raised the possibility that stimuli associated with primary reinforces may have their effects by some other means. This tutorial will provide an overview of the concept of conditioned reinforcement, review...

Staddon, John - Behavior Analysis Since 1960 - How did quantitative behavior analysis begin? What is its relation to the rest of psychobiology? What has it accomplished and where has it failed? I describe the scientific movements that influenced the development of the quantitative analysis of behavior, and a few that did not, but should have.