Chapter 2 of 914% of exam

Concepts and Principles

Domain B is the vocabulary of the science: behavior and stimuli, respondent and operant conditioning, reinforcement and punishment, schedules, stimulus control, motivating operations and verbal behavior. Most items give a short scenario and ask you to name the process at work.

Behavior, stimuli and conditioning

Responses are grouped into classes by function or form, and stimuli into classes by shared effects. Respondent behavior is elicited by preceding stimuli; operant behavior is selected by its consequences. Many real situations involve both processes at once, so identify which response is being asked about.

Response class

A set of responses that share a function, such as several forms of behavior that all produce attention.

Skinner, The generic nature of the concepts of stimulus and response (1935); BACB BCBA Test Content Outline (6th ed.) B.1

Respondent conditioning

A neutral stimulus paired with an unconditioned stimulus comes to elicit a conditioned response; presenting it repeatedly without the unconditioned stimulus is respondent extinction.

Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes (1927)

Operant extinction

Discontinuing reinforcement for a previously reinforced response (operation), producing a decrease in that response (process).

BACB BCBA Test Content Outline (6th ed.) B.11

Reinforcement, punishment and schedules

Positive and negative describe whether a stimulus is added or removed; reinforcement and punishment describe whether future behavior increases or decreases. Schedules specify which responses are reinforced and produce characteristic patterns. Always define the contingency by its effect on future behavior, not by whether the stimulus seems pleasant.

Four contingencies

Adding or removing a stimulus after a response, followed by an increase (reinforcement) or decrease (punishment) in that response.

Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (1953)

Automatic versus socially mediated

Automatic contingencies are produced by the behavior itself; socially mediated ones depend on another person delivering or removing something.

BACB BCBA Test Content Outline (6th ed.) B.6

Generalized conditioned reinforcer

A conditioned reinforcer paired with many backup reinforcers, such as money or tokens, so it does not depend on a single deprivation state.

Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (1953)

Simple and compound schedules

Ratio schedules depend on response counts and interval schedules on time; multiple, mixed, chained and concurrent schedules combine them in different ways.

Ferster & Skinner, Schedules of Reinforcement (1957)

Stimulus control and motivation

A discriminative stimulus signals that a consequence is available; a motivating operation changes how effective that consequence is. Generalization and discrimination describe how widely stimulus control extends. A stimulus can have both functions at once, so ask what each one is doing.

Discriminative stimulus

A stimulus in whose presence a response has been reinforced and in whose absence it has not; it comes to evoke the response.

BACB BCBA Test Content Outline (6th ed.) B.12-B.13

Motivating operation

An environmental variable with a value-altering effect on a consequence and a behavior-altering effect on responses that have produced it.

Laraway, Snycerski, Michael & Poling, JABA 36 (2003)

MO versus SD

MOs alter reinforcer effectiveness; SDs signal differential availability.

Michael, JEAB 37 (1982)

Stimulus and response generalization

The trained response occurring to new stimuli, versus new response forms occurring under the trained conditions.

Stokes & Baer, JABA 10 (1977)

Verbal behavior, emergent relations and choice

Skinner classified verbal operants by their controlling variables. The outline also covers emergent relations, behavioral momentum and the matching law. Classify a verbal response by what controls it, not by the words spoken.

Mand, tact, intraverbal, echoic

Mand: controlled by a motivating operation. Tact: controlled by a nonverbal stimulus. Intraverbal: controlled by verbal stimuli without point-to-point correspondence. Echoic: vocal copy of a vocal model.

Skinner, Verbal Behavior (1957)

Multiple control

Most verbal responses have more than one controlling variable at once.

Skinner, Verbal Behavior (1957)

Stimulus equivalence

After training some conditional relations, untrained relations (reflexivity, symmetry, transitivity) emerge.

Sidman & Tailby, JEAB 37 (1982)

Momentum and matching

Resistance to change tracks the reinforcement rate in a context; relative response rates tend to match relative reinforcement rates.

Nevin, JEAB 21 (1974); Herrnstein, JEAB 4 (1961)

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