Commentary: What are behavior systems and what use are they?

Grounding applied animal behavior practices in the experimental analysis of behavior

Some of the earliest applications outside the laboratory of principles derived from the experimental analysis of behavior (EAB), such as the pioneering work of Keller and Marian Breland, involved animals. This translational tradition continues to the present as EAB-related behavior principles are applied with increasing frequency to behavior management and training practices with animals in nonlaboratory settings. Such translations, and those populations to which they are applied, benefit from a rigorous experimental analysis of practices that are promulgated in popular outlets. These translations both affirm the generality of those principles and serve as goads for laboratory and field research that can further articulate extant principles, develop new ones, and refine methods of application and assessment. This review considered several areas of basic EAB research and contemporary applied animal behavior (AAB) practices in relation to one another: (1) response establishment and maintenance, (2) response reduction and elimination, (3) chaining and conditioned reinforcement, and (4) discriminative stimulus control. Within each topic, a selection of processes and procedures in both EAB and AAB work were reviewed in relation to one another.

Molecular analyses of the principal components of response strength

Killeen and Hall (2001) showed that a common factor called strength underlies the key dependent variables of response probability, latency, and rate, and that overall response rate is a good predictor of strength. In a search for the mechanisms that underlie those correlations, this article shows that (a) the probability of responding on a trial is a two-state Markov process; (b) latency and rate of responding can be described in terms of the probability and period of stochastic machines called clocked Bernoulli modules, and (c) one such machine, the refractory Poisson process, provides a functional relation between the probability of observing a response during any epoch and the rate of responding. This relation is one of proportionality at low rates and curvilinearity at higher rates.