Philip N. Hineline

Interteaching: A strategy for enhancing the user-friendliness of behavioral arrangements in the college classroom

Abstract“Interteaching” is an arrangement for college classroom instruction that departs from the standard lecture format and offers an answer to criticisms commonly directed at behavioral teaching techniques. This approach evolved from exploratory use of small-group arrangements and Ferster and Perrott’s (1968) “interview technique,” leading ultimately to a format that is organized around focused dyadic discussion. Specific suggestions are offered that might enable both seasoned and novice instructors to incorporate this or similar arrangements into their classrooms. This approach retains some key characteristics of Keller’s personalized system of instruction and precision teaching, but offers greater flexibility for strategies that are based on behavioral principles.

Lever biting as an avoidance response

Lever biting was not supported in three rats for which this was the only response that could postpone shock. Four naive rats for which both lever biting and leverpressing could postpone shock consistently pressed the lever, as in conventional Sidman procedures where leverpressing is the only effective response. Two of the four rats bit the lever many times during some sessions, but this did not appear to be controlled by the avoidance contingencies. When only lever biting could postpone shock, the two rats’ lever biting increased, but not sufficiently to avoid as many shocks as they previously avoided by leverpressing. These results advise caution in assigning a major role to defense reactions, such as shock-induced attack, in the acquisition of avoidance.

Correlated Hypothesizing and the Distinction between Contingency-Shaped and Rule-Governed Behavior

Within our culture, references to consciousness, rational thought, and the use of knowledge are taken as straightforward descriptions of basic human functioning. Within psychology, there has been an enduring controversy over whether such terms qualify as basic explanatory terms, or whether they are misleading intrusions from ordinary language. On one hand, cognitivists have conformed to common usage, encorporating “knowledge,” “awareness,” and other terms of mentalistic origin into the groundwork of their theories. These concepts are said to explain why humans (and sometimes animals as well) behave as they do. On the other hand, behavioral traditions have run counter to these patterns. Many behaviorists have asserted that terms of mentalistic origin are inappropriate to a scientific account.

Ethanol consumption and the matching law: a choice analysis using a limited-access paradigm

Choice analyses, especially R. J. Herrnsteins (1961, 1970) matching law, have recently been extended to substance abuse and drug research. The experiment reported here used a limited-access paradigm to engender ethanol consumption in Sprague-Dawley rats (Rattus norvegicus). After stable ethanol consumption was established, several 2-bottle choice tests were run. Relative volumes of solutions consumed were compared to relative ethanol concentrations as an application of the matching law. The formula for the generalized matching law confirmed that although biases varied, they were small, and more important, sensitivities to the relative concentrations were positive in 24 of 28 subjects. The results also revealed a high positive correlation between baseline ethanol consumption (g/kg) and subsequently assessed sensitivity. Overall, these findings suggest that a matching law analysis can be useful for examining ethanol intake in randomly bred rats.

Relative preferences for various bivalued ratio schedules

Widely cited experiments on optimal foraging have used bivalued distributions as representing environmental stochasticity, characterizing these in terms of their arithmetic means. In contrast, research on free-operant choice has established that organisms prefer variable patterns of food delivery, relative to fixed patterns with the same mean values. To explore such departures from linear averaging, specifically with respect to bivalued alternatives, pigeons were given choices between a fixed-ratio (FR) schedule of food delivery that required 15, 30, or 60 responses and bivalued variable-ratio schedules with an arithmetic mean of 60,5 or 60, A bivalued schedule of 1 and 120 was preferred almost exclusively over each of the FR values. With a bivalued schedule of 15 and 105, there was a shift of preference, most notably in the FR-15 condition, but in no case was linear averaging a good predictor of the birds’ choices. Geometric averaging fared better, but even this failed to represent the apparent salience of the minimum value of the bivalued schedule in some conditions.

Training and maintenance of keypecking in the pigeon by negative reinforcement.

Pigeons were trained to peck a key to escape a pulsing shock of linearly increasing intensity. As the rate of increase was varied from 0.0374 milliamperes per minute to 37.4 milliamperes per minute, the intensity at which most pecking occurred varied from 2.2 to 5.0 milliamperes.

Private versus Inner in Multiscaled Interpretation

It sometimes is important to account for someone’s behavior when the relevant environmental facts are inaccessible. Baum’s (2011) essay seems to belittle that problem, especially when fine-grained analyses might be relevant. Schnaitter (1978) proposed a solution to it by delineating the difference between behavior analysis and behavior-analytic interpretation. The former entails manipulative assessment of behavior–environment relations, whereas the latter accounts for behavior by appealing to the kinds of relations that have previously been verified through analysis, an appeal that includes hypothesizing the occurrence of inaccessible facts that are thus private despite their environmental status, and that is fairly standard practice for addressing practical problems. The private events aspect of the argument was introduced earlier, by Skinner (1945),

The Aesthetics of Behavioral Arrangements.

With their origins in scientific validation, behavior-analytic applications have understandably been developed with an engineering rather than a crafting orientation. Nevertheless, traditions of craftsmanship can be instructive for devising aesthetically pleasing arrangements—arrangements that people will try, and having tried, will choose to continue living with. Pye (1968) provides suggestions for this, particularly through his distinctions between workmanship of risk versus workmanship of certainty, and the mating of functional precision with effective or otherwise pleasing variability. Close examination of woodworking tools as well as antique machines offers instructive analogues that show, for instance, that misplaced precision can be dysfunctional when precision is not essential to a design. Variability should be allowed or even encouraged. Thus, in the design of behavioral contingencies as well as of practical or purely aesthetic objects, ‘‘precise versus variable’’ is not necessarily a distinction between good and bad. More generally, behavior analysts would do well to look beyond their technical experience for ways to improve the aesthetics of contingency design while continuing to understand the resulting innovations in relation to behavior-analytic principles.

Effects of Early Chemotherapeutic Treatment on Learning in Adolescent Mice: Implications for Cognitive Impairment and Remediation in Childhood Cancer Survivors

Purpose: Among children diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and given chemotherapy-only treatment, 40% to 70% of survivors experience neurocognitive impairment. The present study used a preclinical mouse model to investigate the effects of early exposure to common ALL chemotherapeutics methotrexate (MTX) and cytarabine (Ara-C) on learning and memory. Experimental Design: Preweanling mouse pups were treated on postnatal day (PND) 14, 15, and 16 with saline, MTX, Ara-C, or a combination of MTX and Ara-C. Nineteen days after treatment (PND 35), behavioral tasks measuring different aspects of learning and memory were administered. Results: Significant impairment in acquisition and retention over both short (1 hour) and long (24 hours) intervals, as measured by autoshaping and novel object recognition tasks, was found following treatment with MTX and Ara-C. Similarly, a novel conditional discrimination task revealed impairment in acquisition for chemotherapy-treated mice. No significant group differences were found following the extensive training component of this task, with impairment following the rapid training component occurring only for the highest MTX and Ara-C combination group. Conclusions: Findings are consistent with those from clinical studies suggesting that childhood cancer survivors are slower at learning new information and primarily exhibit deficits in memory years after successful completion of chemotherapy. The occurrence of mild deficits on a novel conditional discrimination task suggests that chemotherapy-induced cognitive impairment may be ameliorated through extensive training or practice. Clin Cancer Res; 19(11); 3008–18. ©2013 AACR.

The Several Meanings of “Positive”

Abstract Wiegand and Geller propose that the salient role of positive reinforcement in behavior analysis should enable a melding of behavior analysis with developments and concepts that have appeared under the banner of “positive psychology.” However, as is true of many words, the term positive has more than one meaning, and the positive of positive reinforcement is not the same as the positive of “positive psychology.” The latter is parasitic upon the vernacular, as “nice” or “desirable,” whereas the former is analogous to the algebraic “add” as when an action produces the appearance (as contrasted with the removal) of some event. The distinct meanings become clear with recognition that addictive and criminal behavior often are maintained through positive reinforcement, and that negative reinforcement of behavior often is benign and beneficial to the persons involved. In addition, most of the phenomena identified with positive psychology that Wiegand and Geller propose to embrace entail more subtle and complex combinations of behavioral principles than these authors acknowledge. Wiegand and Geller also propose to accommodate vernacular assumptions in ways that separate their approach from its conceptual base; this risks impairing the effectiveness of their work whether or not its marketability would be improved.