The response-stimulus contingency and reinforcement learning as a context for considering two non-behavior-analytic views of contingency learning.

This paper introduces a special section on the contingency. Bower and Watson were invited to present their views of contingency learning in human infants from outside the context of behavior analysis, and Cigales, Marr, and Lattal and Shahan provided commentaries that point out some of the more interesting and controversial aspects of those views from a behavior-analytic perspective. The debate turns on how to conceptualize the response-stimulus contingency of operant learning. The present paper introduces the contingency concept and contingency detection by subjects, as well as research practices in behavior analysis, in a context in which the dependency between infant responding and the presentation of environmental consequences may be disrupted through procedures in which ordinarily consequent events occur before the response or in its absence. These points can relate to and serve as an introduction to the Bower and Watson papers on infant contingency learning as well as to the three commentaries that follow.

B. F. Skinner's legacy to human infant behavior and development.

B. F. Skinner's legacy to human behavioral research for the study of environment-infant interactions, and indeed for the conception of development itself, is described and exemplified. The legacy is largely the practicality, the efficiency, and the comparative advantage--relative to diverse other behavioral and nonbehavioral approaches--of using the operant-learning paradigm to organize and explain many of the sequential changes in behavior patterns conventionally thought to constitute infant development.

Leave-takings and reunions of infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and their parents.

The leave-taking and reunion behaviors of infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and their parents were observed as the children were "dropped off" and "picked up" at their nursery school each day. On arrival at their classroom, infants and toddlers related primarily to their parents, whereas preschoolers related to their teachers. Girls more frequently engaged in interaction with their teachers, and boys more frequently approached the children's play activities. Distress behaviors during the parents' departures were most frequently shown by toddlers, and the toddlers' parents hovered about them and " sneaked out of the room" more frequently. Children dropped off by mothers versus fathers showed more attention-getting behavior and crying, and mothers versus fathers engaged in more "distracting-the-child" behaviors and showed a longer latency to leave the classroom. During the second semester of observations parents and children spent less time relating to each other during leave-taking, children protested the departures less frequently, and the parents left the classroom more quickly. Regression analyses on distress behaviors during leave- takings and ambivalent behavior during reunions suggested that parent behaviors such as verbal explanation, distracting the child, latency to leave, and " sneaking out of the room" were correlated with children's distress and leave-taking distress was related to ambivalent behavior at reunion.