When the matching-to-sample (MTS) procedure is used, different training structures imply differences in the successive discriminations required in training and test conditions. When the go/no-go procedure with compound stimuli is used, however, differences in training structures do not imply such differences. This study assessed whether the…

The effects of social praise contingent on either usual (conventional) or unusual (unconventional) responses during an object uses task were assessed on measures of generalized creativity in two novel, unrelated tasks. Participants were 20 older adults, ages 63 to 89 years (M = 80.90), who were recruited from a joint skilled nursing and assisted…

Acceptance and commitment therapy asserts that in clinical problems such as rumination and depression, making sense continues despite accompanying aversive consequences, because sense-making is reinforcing, particularly when it leads to experiential avoidance. The following series of experiments aimed to provide preliminary empirical evidence for…

Consumer behavior analysis can be applied over a wide range of economic topics in which the main focus is the contingencies that influence the behavior of the economic agent. This paper provides an overview on the work that has been done on the impact from motivating operations at the point of online purchase situation. Motivating operations, a…

Essential value is defined by Hursh and Silberberg (2008) as the value of reinforcers, presented in an exponential model (Equation 1). This study extends previous research concerned with animal behavior or human responding in therapeutic situations. We applied 9 available demand curves to consumer data that included 10,000+ data points collected…

Not much is known about the interaction effects between current and past contingencies. At the brand level, consumers may or may not buy exactly what they bought or intended to buy on their last shopping trip, and this could be due to differences in the behavioral contingencies. The main purpose of this article was to examine possible relations…

The current study examined the variables that influence postreinforcement pause (PRP) duration in rats when wheel running serves as the reinforcing consequence. The relationship between revolutions and PRP duration when revolutions were manipulated within a session and the effect of changing the response requirement from fixed to variable on PRP…

This study examined the functional independence of mand and tact operants in normally developing children and evaluated the role of S[superscript D]s in demonstrating emergent responding. In Experiment 1, 4 children aged 4 to 5 years, were trained to mand or tact using left/right relations, then were tested for the emergence of the untaught…

One member of each pair of 52 undergraduates, referred to as a learner, was trained BC conditional discriminations, with B stimuli as the samples and C stimuli as the correct comparisons. Responses of the learner were either reinforced or punished by another member of each pair, an instructor, who had previously mastered AC conditional…

Prior research has demonstrated the establishment of reinforcers for learning and maintenance with young children as a function of social learning where a peer and an adult experimenter were present. The presence of an adult experimenter was eliminated in the present study to test if the effect produced in the prior studies would occur with only…

We employ a behavioral-economic equation put forward by Hursh and Silberberg (2008) to explain human consumption behavior among substitutable food brands, applying a consumer-choice model--the behavioral perspective model (BPM; Foxall, 1990/2004, 2005). In this study, we apply the behavioral-economic equation to human economic consumption data. We…

The present study investigated the effect of the presence of the experimenter on behavioral sensitivity to contingency change. In history training, college students were exposed to differential reinforcement of low rate (DRL) and fixed-ratio (FR) schedules, and in testing, to a fixed-interval (FI) schedule. For the control group, instructions were…

Historically, researchers have never quite been able to agree as to the role of emotions, if any, when behavior is selected by its consequences. A brief review of findings from several fields suggests that in contingency-shaped behavior, motivating events, often unconscious, seem needed for reinforcement to select behavior. In rule-governed…

Subjects completed a baseline stimulus matching procedure designed to produce two symmetrical stimulus relations; A1-B1 and A2-B2. Using A1, B1, and two novel stimuli, subjects were then trained to produce a common key-press response for two stimuli and a second key-press response for two further stimuli across two blocks of response training.…

This article introduces the quantitative analysis of choice behavior by describing a number of equations developed over the years to describe the relation between the allocation of behavior under concurrent schedules of reinforcement and the consequences received for alternative responses. Direct proportionality between rate of responding and rate…