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ABOUT SKINNER AND TIME: BEHAVIOR‐ANALYTIC CONTRIBUTIONS TO RESEARCH ON ANIMAL TIMING
Author(s) -
Lejeune Helga,
Richelle Marc,
Wearden J. H.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
journal of the experimental analysis of behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.75
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1938-3711
pISSN - 0022-5002
DOI - 10.1901/jeab.2006.85.04
Subject(s) - animal behavior , psychology , time perception , cognitive science , sort , adaptive behavior , reinforcement , cognitive psychology , animal learning , animal cognition , timer , cognition , behavioural sciences , operant conditioning , psychophysics , neuroscience , computer science , developmental psychology , social psychology , perception , zoology , biology , information retrieval , computer hardware , psychotherapist , microcontroller
The article discusses two important influences of B. F. Skinner, and later workers in the behavior‐analytic tradition, on the study of animal timing. The first influence is methodological, and is traced from the invention of schedules imposing temporal constraints or periodicities on animals in The Behavior of Organisms , through the rate differentiation procedures of Schedules of Reinforcement , to modern temporal psychophysics in animals. The second influence has been the development of accounts of animal timing that have tried to avoid reference to internal processes of a cognitive sort, in particular internal clock mechanisms. Skinner's early discussion of temporal control is first reviewed, and then three recent theories—Killeen & Fetterman's (1988) Behavioral Theory of Timing; Machado's (1997) Learning to Time; and Dragoi, Staddon, Palmer, & Buhusi's (2003) Adaptive Timer Model—are discussed and evaluated.