Teaching Behavior Analysis through Its History: Narrative and Stories.

Four articles appear in a special section of the current issue of this journal. Each offers methods for introducing students to the history of behavior analysis. Their distinctive approaches vary from delineating a course addressed specifically to history, to combining issues in behavior analysis with those within related fields, or to splicing historical events or methods into various courses within behavior analysis. I sketch these briefly to encourage readers to read them directly before proposing that the history of our field can also be understood both as an overarching narrative and as a collection of stories. Boje (2008) distinguishes between the two by characterizing narrative as a rather formal, organized account, on the one hand, with stories, on the other hand, being more disorderly episodes of behavior-in-process. Each has its roles for introducing behavior analysis-and even for effectively understanding it ourselves-and thus, the best place of each within strategies of teaching, bears systematic examination. Although narrative supplies an organized account, stories more strongly engage the reader. Stories are especially effective at keeping the reader or listener engaged when they entail nested relations delineated by establishing stimuli. Besides offering a principle of organization, this formulation yields a strategy for using stories to enable the overarching narrative to sustain the reader's or listener's behavior.

Kurt Salzinger (1929-2018).

This article memorializes Kurt Salzinger (1929-2018). Salzinger's main focus of research was schizophrenic speech and its functional characteristics. Collaborating with several colleagues, most notably Stephanie Portnoy (nee Pisoni) and Richard S. Feldman, he documented verbal conditioning without awareness through ingenious experiments in the clinic waiting room, finding that patients with schizophrenia differed from normal controls only in their rates of extinction. They then found that self-referencing statements not only were susceptible to subtle reinforcers, but also that speed of such conditioning predicted the duration of hospitalization. Addressing more generally, they found evidence for an "immediacy hypothesis," whereby individuals with schizophrenia reacted to an extremely limited range of immediate events, including their own utterances. Among the acknowledgments of the quality of his research were an NSF Award for Sustained Superior Performance in 1981 and "The Most Meritorious Article in 1994" award by the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Narrative: Why It's Important, and How It Works.

Behavior analysts have said little about narrative and storytelling, emphasizing instead the functional/pragmatic aspects of verbal behavior. Nevertheless, these are ubiquitous human activities, and they are important to understand. Stories are prominent in essays on social issues, fund-raising appeals and political speeches, and they are the bedrock of theater. Foundational narratives are at the roots of major religions and of conflicts between them, and narrative has been proposed as an organizing basis for psychological wellbeing as well as a source of empathetic reactions. The ongoing process of reading or hearing a good story entails interlocking relations between establishing stimuli and their related, differentiated reinforcing consequences, with a story's coherence providing a key to its reinforcing effects. What are the behavioral principles that underlie the repertoires involved in all this? Behavior analysts have defined and studied some-the basic verbal classes, of course, although temporally extended sequences require some adjustments in these. Intraverbal behavior needs to be parsed into sub-categories to delineate highly varied sequences such as occur in paraphrase and translation. These two, along with imitation, generalized imitation and re-telling of stories, entail a salient role of complex invariance. The terms pliance and tracking help to balance the roles of speaker and listener, and to account for joint attention, which appears important in early verbal development. Transfer and transformation of function are additional ubiquitous processes, addressed through stimulus equivalence, relational frames, and other higher-order operants, especially naming, which entails the fusion of speaking and listening. Finally, we should consider ways in which a behavioral understanding of narrative can serve both behavior analysis and its surrounding culture.

An Alternative Strategy for Selecting a Graduate Program: Comments on Dixon et al. (2015).

While the rankings based upon frequencies of publication, supplied by Dixon et al. (2015), identify individuals and programs worthy of prospective students' attention, I have focused upon other criteria when mentoring students who are deciding where to apply for graduate study. Those criteria concern the student's particular interests, and questions concerning what it is like to work with a given mentor or within a given program. Besides perusals of web sites and queries directed to prospective mentors, students already working with that mentor can provide valuable information. Provision for hands-on training in the application of behavioral principles is essential to a high-quality program, and availability of conceptually oriented courses and of a supportive verbal community are additional considerations, especially if a mentor is not frequently available for informal conversation. As alternatives, the Behavior Analysis Certification Board's credential has the limitations of any multiple-choice examination as an evaluation of hands-on competence, and the accreditation of programs by the Association for Behavior Analysis International omits many mentorships that have trained outstanding behavior analysts via "apprenticeships" within programs that are not primarily behavior analytic.

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.

Disruption of learning processes by chemotherapeutic agents in childhood survivors of acute lymphoblastic leukemia and preclinical models.

OBJECTIVE: With the survival rate of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) surpassing 90 percent within this decade, new research is emerging in the field of late effects. A review of the research investigating the relationship of treatment regimens for ALL to specific late effect deficits, underlying mechanisms, and possible remediation is warranted to support continued studies. METHODS: The clinical literature was briefly surveyed to describe the occurrence and topography of late effects, specifically neurocognitive deficits. Additionally, the preclinical literature was reviewed to uncover potential underlying mechanisms of these deficits. The advantages of using rodent models to answer these questions are outlined, as is an assessment of the limited number of rodent models of childhood cancer treatment. RESULTS: The literature supports that childhood survivors of ALL exhibit academic difficulties and are more likely to be placed in a special education program. Behavioral evidence has highlighted impairments in the areas of attention, working memory, and processing speed, leading to a decrease in full scale IQ. Neurophysiological and preclinical evidence for these deficits has implicated white matter abnormalities and acquired brain damage resulting from specific chemotherapeutic agents commonly used during treatment. CONCLUSIONS: The exact role of chemotherapeutic agents in learning deficits remains mostly unknown. Recommendations for an improved rodent model of learning deficits in childhood cancer survivors are proposed, along with suggestions for future directions in this area of research, in hopes that forthcoming treatment regimens will reduce or eliminate these types of impairments.

The probability of small schedule values and preference for random-interval schedules.

Preference for working on variable schedules and temporal discrimination were simultaneously examined in two experiments using a discrete-trial, concurrent-chains arrangement with fixed interval (FI) and random interval (RI) terminal links. The random schedule was generated by first sampling a probability distribution after the programmed delay to reinforcement on the FI schedule had elapsed, and thus the RI never produced a component schedule value shorter than the FI and maintained a rate of reinforcement half that of the FI. Despite these features, the FI was not strongly preferred. The probability of obtaining the smallest programmed delay to reinforcement on the RI schedule was manipulated in Experiment 1, and the interaction of this probability and initial link length was examined in Experiment 2. As the probability of obtaining small values in the RI increased, preference for the schedule increased while the discriminated time of reinforcer availability in the terminal link decreased. Both of these effects were attenuated by lengthening the initial links. The results support the view that in addition to the delay to reinforcement, the probability of obtaining a short delay is an important choice-affecting variable that likely contributes to the robust preferences for variable, as opposed to fixed, schedules of reinforcement.

Pigeons' choices between fixed-interval and random-interval schedules: utility of variability?

Pigeons' choosing between fixed-interval and random-interval schedules of reinforcement was investigated in three experiments using a discrete-trial procedure. In all three experiments, the random-interval schedule was generated by sampling a probability distribution at an interval (and in multiples of the interval) equal to that of the fixed-interval schedule. Thus the programmed delays to reinforcement on the random alternative were never shorter and were often longer than the fixed interval. Despite this feature, the fixed schedule was not strongly preferred. Increases in the probability used to generate the random interval resulted in decreased preferences for the fixed schedule. In addition, the number of consecutive choices on the preferred alternative varied directly with preference, whereas the consecutive number of choices on the nonpreferred alternative was fairly constant. The probability of choosing the random alternative was unaffected by the immediately prior interval encountered on that schedule, even when it was very long relative to the average value. The results loosely support conceptions of a "preference for variability" from foraging theory and the "utility of behavioral variability" from human decision-making literatures.

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.

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

"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.