Kacelnik, Alex - Facts and Theories in Decision Making: Sturnus vulgaris vs. Benjamin Franklin - Understanding decision-making involves many disciplines, including Evolutionary Biology, Economics, Psychology and Quantitative Behavioral Analysis. In this tutorial I review recent experiments on choice between different combinations of amount and delay to food that used starlings as experimental animals. The results are contrasted with predictions from theoretical models originating in these...

Gallistel, Randy - The Hierarchical Organization of Behavior - Elementary units of behavior are assemblages of neural, endocrine, and muscular components sufficient to explain naturally occurring actions. All such assemblages require an initiator component, where the neural signals that ultimately drive the action originate, conductor components that relay the signals from the initiators to the effectors, and effector components that translate the signals into movements and secretions. Some...

McDowell, Jack -Uniformity, Chaos, And Complexity: Mining Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" - Stephen Wolfram's massive self-published tome, "A new kind of science", has been criticized by various reviewers as overwrought, repetitive, egocentric, insufficiently documented, megalomaniacal, too Mathematica-focused nothing new, self-indulgent, the raving of a crackpot, and false. Whether or not one wishes to believe Wolfram's occasional extravagant claims, such as that continuity and motion in...

MacDonall, James - Getting Started in Quantitative Analyses of Behavior - The purpose of this tutorial is to help those who are interested in attempting quantitative analyses. As an organizing theme I will use my experiences to provide some suggestions for how to get started. Included will be suggestions for organizing data using several common computer programs for data analyses, and for avoiding some of the pitfalls that await the unwary. While there will be something for everyone, I am...

Killeen, Peter - The relative frequency of realizable events predicts winnings over multiple games and demonstrates the irrelevance of expected value based on limiting probabilities.

Killeen, Peter - The Law of Affect - Skinner divorced the Law of Effect from Thondike's satisfiers. and remarried it to a change in the frequency of the response being reinforced; the Operant Canon holds that reinforcers need not be pleasurable. But why then was our ability to be pleasured selected for over our evolutionary history? Is it in fact generally to our evolutionary advantage to increase the frequency of responses that are reinforced? Thorndike operationally defined satisfiers as a...

Grace, Randolph - A simple framework for understanding how quantitative analyses may be helpful for behavior analysis.

Cook, Robert – Stimulus Control - Stimulus control is one of the essential features of behavior, as animals learn to differentially behave to specific stimuli in a remarkably wide variety of settings. This important capacity allows animals to adaptively organize their behavior to both present and future situations. This tutorial will I provide an overview of this topic, its fundamental methods, established principles and mechanisms, and outstanding problems and issues. These themes will be...

Balsam, Peter – Time, Uncertainty and Anticipation - Even in the simplest of conditioning procedures animals learn about temporal relationships between events, sometimes over long delays. The encoding of temporal information seems to be automatic and occurs from the very start of learning. The temporal information affects how long it takes for conditioned responses to emerge and the form and timing of the learned behavior. Formal information theory applied to temporal signals provides an...

Catania, Charles -Creating Artificial Behavior: A Tutorial on Modeling - A model that generates good approximations to real behavior can help us see how behavior works. Both moment-to-moment features of behavior as shown in cumulative records and global input-output functions as derived from parametric studies of reinforcement schedules can be simulated by a variant of Skinner's Reflex Reserve. Skinner's model, in which reinforced responses added to a reserve depleted by later responding,...

Burgos, Jose - Neural-Network Modeling in Conditioning Research - This tutorial is a primer to neural-network modeling in conditioning research. After a brief historical introduction to this kind of modeling and philosophical disquisition on model plausibility in empirical science, the elementary concepts of neural processing element, connection, activation function, and learning function, are presented. Emphasis is made on the concept of a neural network as a set of (inter)connected...

Newland, Christopher & Donlin, Wendy - Applied Modeling and the Identification of Behavioral Mechanisms of Action - A good model will reduce behavior to its fundamental elements. If successful, then this distillation can be exported to other research domains to address mechanistic questions. In our case, for example, the goal is the understanding of how environmental contaminants disrupt operant behavior. We describe our application of models to address the behavioral consequences of...

Shimp, Charles - Explicit Methods and Implicit Human Values in Quantitative Behavioral Models - Quantitative models of behavior will be described, sorted, and informally categorized in terms of their underlying metaphors, including geometric, mechanical, hydraulic, electromechanical, statistical, computer, cosmological, philosophical, political, ecological, and logical metaphors. They will also be categorized in terms of the purposes for whic1they are constructed, including to summarize data,...

Grace, Randolph -Choice and Value - Herrnstein's (1961) discovery that response allocation matched relative reinforcement rate in concurrent schedules - 'the matching law' - began a tradition of research on behavioral choice. Subsequently, however, theoretical explanations for the matching law proliferated, with no clear resolution. I argue that the problem has been that the concurrent schedules procedure is unable to answer the questions it was originally meant to. The more complex...

Galbicka, Gregory - Response Shaping and Percentile Schedules - or "How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Rank Orders" - In the Behavior of Organisms, Skinner detailed a process of differential reinforcement of successive approximations to a terminal response, subsequently termed 'shaping,' to create novel behaviors. Despite its fundamental nature in operant conditioning, shaping has little been studied, in either the laboratory or more applied settings. Owing to the dynamic nature of...

Church, Russell - Simulation of Quantitative Models of Behavior - Quantitative models of behavior have been developed that may be compared to observations of behavior. Simulated data comes from the interaction of a procedure and the quantitative model; observed data comes from the interaction of a procedure and an animal. The evaluation of a simulation is based on a comparison of the observed and simulated data, and on the simplicity and generality of the model. This talk will focus on how to...

Cerutti, Daniel - Temoral Regulation of Choice - In the simplest example of temporal control, animals responding on a fixed interval (Fl) schedule show a characteristic pause-and-respond pattern-the Fl "scallop." Parametric research on FT schedules reveals a lawful relationship between post-reinforcement-pausing and the inter-food interval (IFI), pausing is a fixed proportion of IFI. If temporal control of any sort is common to all schedules of reinforcement, it should play a role in...

Williams, Ben - The problem solving needed to maximize clinical outcomes in medicine would be facilitated by the adaptation of behavior analytic concepts.

Marr, Jackson - What Good Is Mathematics?: Modeling in Behavior Analysis - The principles and methods of behavior analysis have revealed remarkable orderliness in behavior, unique in the psychological sciences. As such, the quantification of behavioral phenomena is ubiquitous and has attained considerable sophistication. The primary purpose of this tutorial is to give a general overview of the enterprise of mathematical modeling as it has been applied to behavior analysis. Some features of...

Mazur, James - Choice and the Hyperbolic Decay of Reinforcer Strength - Results from a variety of species suggest that as a reinforcer's delay increases, its strength decreases according to a hyperbolic function. This tutorial will review how a hyperbolic decay equation can account for choice in self control situations, choice with probabilistic reinforcers, preference for variability. procrastination. and other Some unresolved unresolved puzzles about the effects of delayed reinforcers will...

McDowell, Jack - Fitting Equations to Data: A Case Study in Mathematical Theory Testing - Classic matching theory consists of four equations entailing two parameters. Three of these equations apply to concurrent schedules, one to single schedules. Modern matching theory consists of five equations entailing eight parameters; four equations apply to concurrent schedules, one to single schedules. The three concurrent-schedule equations of classic matching theory can be fitted simultaneously to a...

Perone, Michael -Behavior Variability: Control, Description, and Analysis - Variability is fundamental to the analysis of behavior. Both basic and applied behavior analysts emphasize systematic variability, the kinds of behavioral changes they bring about by manipulating environmental factors in laboratory or field settings. They are inclined to eschew statistical evaluations of these changes in favor of demonstrations of experimental control. But behavior analysts cannot avoid statistical...

Machado, Armando - Probability: Basic Ideas, Techniques, and Applications - In the first part of this tutorial, I will introduce the basic ideas of probability theory (e.g., sample spaces, events, the axioms of the theory) and then illustrate their application in a variety of practical situations some of which related to the psychology of learning. In the second part of the tutorial, I will present a few techniques that may help in solving specific problems, techniques that include counting...

Killeen, Peter – IRTs, Rts, andTs - Come one, come all. See the spaces between behavior. Strange beasts revealed: Hazard survival with IRTs per Op. Tran-substantiate probabilities into rates. Pit Palya machines against Shull machines. See what else the dead white statisticians Gumbel, Poisson, Bernoulli and Erlang have in common. Luced [sic] expositions on distributions. Free to every guest, a whizzo spreadsheet that chops slices and dices; just insert data and you're only a click away from...

Wixted, John - Utility of Signal Detection Theory - Signal-detection theory has been around for decades, but its ability to help one think productively about a wide array of issues is not as widely appreciated as it should he. Seemingly unrelated issues are often revealed to have a common denominator when they are considered in light of detection theory, and the flaws in some otherwise intuitively appealing ideas can be fully appreciated by contrasting those ideas with a detection theory...