We again dedicate this book to the memory of W. Frank Epling who was coauthor of the first two editions of Behavior Analysis and Learning. He was a great personal friend of ours, an excellent teacher, and a productive colleague. We have tried to make this fourth edition as good as Frank would accept.
We received a great deal of positive feedback from readers and users of the third edition, which we greatly appreciate. This fourth edition retains much of the major organization, information, and features of the previous editions, yet, as with any revision, we made several alterations in topics and presentation. We tried to respond to user and reviewer comments and to the availability of new information from the literature. Reviewers report that although this is a basic experimental analysis text, they liked the inclusion of applied human and nonhuman examples, and we continue this feature. Most readers indicated that they appreciate the use of Mechner notation as a clear depiction of the experimental contingencies, the independent variables that control behavior. Users and reviewers also encouraged us to include more biobehavioral findings, which we have done. For example, recent reports of “mirror” neurons and their possible involvement in imitation are discussed. We also outline the role of the nucleus accumbens in choice behavior, and the involvement of the amygdala in conditioned reinforcement. An added treatment of the vocal apparatus and verbal behavior contributes, we feel, to the synthesis of biology and behavior. Although we remain dedicated to behavior analysis we appreciate the movement toward a synthesis of a science of behavior with neuroscience.
The pedagogical features remaining in the fourth edition include the Focus On inserts, the Advanced Sections, and On The Applied Side presentations: all considered important and helpful. The Advanced Sections have been moved to the end of chapters to permit instructors to address basic material without discussion of more complicated issues. We have added a New Directions component and Chapter Summaries which we expect will improve student progress.
In this edition we have updated nearly all areas, topics, and coverage as required by new findings, and we have incorporated several different study features. For readers/users we have collected all study questions that had been at the end of each chapter, PowerPoint presentations we have developed, video vignettes illustrating specific points, and other material considered helpful, on a dedicated website at: www.psypress.com/pierceandcheney. Using this system, the authors can add, delete, or alter material as considered appropriate. Many additional websites are indicated, and will be added, which can guide the reader to current items of interest. We consider websites to be a major resource for students and we encourage the instructor to incorporate web assignments whenever appropriate. Although a thorough reading of the text is sufficient to excel, most students nowadays have access to computers, are fluent with using the web, and actually expect to access information via this medium.
Although this is primarily a book about the way the world works with respect to operant behavior and operant conditioning, we maintain a detailed chapter on respondent conditioning but with an abbreviated and less demanding Advanced Section. We also continue to address respondent conditioning in the use of drugs and concepts of tolerance and withdrawal. In other chapters, the section on behavior analysis and education has been extensively expanded, and the discussion of genetic and operant control of behavior has continued with updated references, illustrating selection by consequences at different levels. We have also expanded the emphasis on principles of selection and the biological context of conditioning. Behavior analysts recognize the essential nature of biological contributions and constraints while simultaneously emphasizing what can be done with arbitrary selective procedures (contingency management) to alter socially important behavior.
The organization of the book has not changed because we consider the way it is now to be a systematic and reasonable progression of behavior science as a book format requires. We recommend assigning and treating the material in the order in which it is presented; of course individual adjustments and adaptations are possible for personal considerations best left to the instructor. Chapters 1 and 2 set the boundaries of behavior science and introduce many of the critical historical features and individuals relevant to placing behavior analysis in a context familiar to the reader. At this point, the basic behavior paradigm and the three-term operant contingencies of positive reinforcement and extinction are described in detail. The reinforcement and extinction chapter is followed by schedules of reinforcement, the major independent variable of behavior analysis. A new section on C. B. Ferster and reinforcement schedules shows that all operant behavior varies in rate and form with the programmed contingencies, both in the laboratory and the everyday world of people. Next, we introduce the control of behavior using aversive procedures, and the by-products of aversive control are detailed and emphasized. This particular order of the material allows us to more fully address the contingencies of positive and negative punishment, and negative reinforcement (escape and avoidance). By this point in the book all the basic contingencies have been covered.
Next, we focus on the interrelationship of operant and respondent contingencies and the biological context of behavior, showing that operant and respondent processes often (if not always) work together, or in opposition, in complex interacting relations. At this point, we more directly consider issues of antecedent stimulus control and the regulation of higher order behavioral processes such as conditional discrimination, remembering, and concept formation. Choice and preference based on concurrent schedules of reinforcement are the next logical step; in this fourth edition we retain a treatment of the matching law, address research on optimal foraging, behavioral economics, and self-control, and try to clarify the breadth and application of these areas of investigation. As the natural science of behavior matures, there will be an even greater expansion of these areas of analysis to more complex behavior involving multifaceted contingencies. One example of this is conditioned reinforcement and the regulation of behavior by concurrent-chain schedules of reinforcement. In this edition, we have expanded the coverage of concurrent-chain procedures and how these contingencies are used to evaluate the delay-reduction hypothesis and other accounts of conditioned reinforcement.
Imitation and rule-governed behavior are important issues in the analysis of human behavior and we have updated the chapter devoted to these topics, adding a neuroscience dimension to imitation learning. The analysis of the rule-governed behavior of the listener sets up the subsequent chapter on verbal behavior and analysis of the behavior of the speaker. We tried to compress the discussion of verbal behavior into a useful summary for students at this level, reducing some older material but adding new issues. Although we have not devoted as much space as this critical topic deserves, we considered the basic rationale and fundamental components of Skinner's analysis as well as more current analyses. The issues of private events and equivalence relations are discussed, as are some current reports from the Journal of Verbal Behavior.
We updated the chapter on applied behavior analysis with more examples, new issues, and recent material. It is nearly impossible or unnecessary to separate basic from applied behavior analysis but, due to its social importance and interest to students, a separate applied chapter is warranted. Behavior principles are so compelling that students often invent new applications when they first encounter the concepts of reinforcement and extinction. Our discipline has become more recognized and appreciated from the visible effects on human behavior in applied situations than from the possibly more important, but clearly more esoteric, findings from the lab. Applied behavior analysis is part and parcel of the experimental analysis of behavior and we include it wherever possible.
We end the book with a discussion of three levels of selection: natural selection, selection by reinforcement, and selection at the cultural level. The three levels of selection are described and the commonalities among them are elaborated as principles of nature. This issue bears careful and repeated mention, in our classes at least. It seems to require some repetition and time for many students to grasp the breadth and significance of what the point here is exactly. The utilization of virtually the same process (selection by consequences) to generate functional relations and explanations at vastly different levels of resolution should be impressive. Selection by consequences is the way the world works with few hard-wired actions but an ability to benefit (i.e., change behavior), depending upon the consequences of any action. The consequences of behaving, whether by a salivary gland, a child, or a political group, are what influence the likelihood of repetition of those actions.
Behavior analysis has always been an exciting scientific field and we hope that we have communicated our own enthusiasm for the discipline described in this book. By its very nature, the study of why we do the things we do appeals to nearly everyone very quickly. The formal aspects of behavior analysis and learning are having an impact on education, industry, therapy, animal training, medicine, clinical psychology, and environmental protection, to name only a few areas of successful application. There is an explicit technology available to those who master the principles of behavior and readers can use these principles to change their own and others' behavior. However, our major focus has remained to present the fundamental principles and procedures that form the foundation of a science of behavior.
Of course, many people have directly and indirectly contributed to this text and we thank them all. Our current world view began to take shape during our upbringing and was formed and promoted by family, friends, personal experience, and our teachers and students. We thank them all for what we are and for what we have produced.
W. David Pierce
Carl D. Cheney