Fluency 1 Flashcards
Behavior
The activity of living organisms; human behavior includes everything that people do. A technical definition: “that portion of an organism’s interaction with its environment that is characterized by detectable displacement in space through time of some part of the organism and the result in a measurable change in at least one aspect of the environment”
Explanatory Fiction
A fictitious or hypothetical variable that often takes the form of another name for the observed phenomenon it claims to explain and contributes nothing to a functional account or understanding of the phenomenon, such as “intelligence” or “cognitive awareness” as explanations for why an organism pushes the lever when the light is on and food is available but does not push the lever when the light is off and no food is available.
Mentalism
An approach to explaining behavior that assumes that a mental, or “inner,” dimension exist that differs from a behavioral dimension and that phenomena is this dimension either directly cause or at least mediate some form of behavior, if not all
Determinism
The assumption that the universe is a lawful and orderly place in which phenomena occur in relation to other events and not in a willy-nilly, accidental fashion.
Reflex
A stimulus-response relation consisting of an antecedent stimulus and the respondent behavior it elicits (e.g., bright light-pupil contraction). Unconditioned and conditioned reflexes protect against harmful stimuli, help regulate the internal balance and economy of the organism, and promote reproduction.
Antecedent
An environmental condition or stimulus change existing or occurring prior to a behavior of interest
Behaviorists
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Dead Man Test
If a dead man can do it, it ain’t behavior, and if a dead man can’t do it, then it is behavior (Malott & Suarez, 2003).
Classical Conditioning
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Consequence
A stimulus change that follows a behavior of interest. Some consequences, especially those that are immediate and relevant to current motivational states, have significant influence on future behavior; others have little effect.
Motivating Operation
An environmental variable that (a) alters (increases or decreases) the reinforcing effectiveness of some stimulus, object, or event; and (b) alters (increases or decreases) the current frequency of all behavior that have been reinforced by that stimulus, object, or event.
Evolution
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Phylogeny
The history of the natural evolution of a species.
Ontogeny
The history of the development of an individual organism during its lifetime.
Methodological Behaviorism
A philosophical position that views behavioral events that cannot be publicly observed as outside the realm of science
Radical Behaviorism
A thoroughgoing form of behaviorism that attempts to understand all human behavior, including private events such as thoughts and feelings, in terms of controlling variables in the history of the person (ontogeny) and the species (phylogeny)
Experimental Analysis of Behavior
A natural science approach to the study of behavior as a subject matter in its own right founded by B.F. Skinner; methodological features include rate of response as a basic dependent variable, repeated or continuous measurement of clearly defined response classes, within-subject experimental comparisons instead of group design, visual analysis of graphed data instead of statistical inference, and an emphasis on describing functional relations between behavior and controlling variables in the environment over formal testing.
Conceptual Analysis of Behavior
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Applied Behavior Analysis
The science in which tactics derived from the principles of behavior are applies to improve socially significant behavior and experimentation is used to identify the variables responsible for the improvement in behavior.
Cumulative Recorder
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Functional Relation
A verbal statement summarizing the results of an experiment (or group of related experiments) that describes the occurrence of the phenomena under study as a function of the operation of one or more specified and controlled variable in the the experiment in which a specific change in one event (the dependent variable) can be produced by manipulation another event (the independent variable) and that the change in the dependent variable was unlikely the result of other factors (confounding variables); in behavior analysis expressed as b=f(x1), (x2)… where b is the behavior and x1, x2, ect., are environmental variables of which the behavior is a function.
Empiricism
The object observation of the phenomena of interest; object observations are “independent of the individual prejudices, taste, and private opinions of the scientist… Results of empirical methods are objective in that they are open to anyone’s observation and do not depend on the subjective belief of the individual scientist”
Parsimony
The practice of ruling out simple, logical explanations, experimentally or conceptually, before considering more complex or abstract explanations.
Philosophic Doubt
An attitude that the truthfulness and validity of all scientific theory and knowledge should be continually questioned.
