Andy Lattal, PhD

Anday Lattal Headshot

Andy Lattal is Centennial Professor of Psychology at West Virginia University, where he has taught and mentored 45 doctoral students since 1972. Andy’s research, covering a host of topics across the discipline’s spectrum, has appeared in more than 180 research articles, chapters, and edited books. A past Editor of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, he currently serves in editorial capacities for eight professional journals. Andy has been recognized with several teaching and research awards, and for his professional service with the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis’s awards for Distinguished Service to Behavior Analysis and for the International Dissemination of Behavior Analysis. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Lille in France and in 2019 will be a Fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science in residence at Osaka Kyoiku University in Osaka, Japan.

Posts by this Author

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Pigeons Skinner Box

Dissing Ability

Suddenly, an observable response pattern—reading—is turned into an internal state.
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Catch Up Contingencies Barn

Catch-Up Contingencies

Ever heard the expression “closing the barn door after the cows are out?”  It basically means coming up with a solution that is too little, too late, to work.
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Mother Scolding Child

When Punishment is a Reinforcer

Punishment, by definition, reduces, weakens, or eliminates (depending on one’s theoretical bias) the responses on which it depends. But punishment also reinforces other behavior, notably that of the one administering the punishment. It does so because the behavior being punished is reduced or ceases altogether. And once the behavior of punishing is reinforced, it is likely to continue and…
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Woman Cleaning Looking Frantic

Obsessing Over OCD in these Days of COVID-19

“Wash your hands for as long as it takes to sing the ‘Happy birthday’ song - twice” is the mantra of 2020, and with good reason.
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Small Monkeys on a Branch

What is Social Behavior?

In an old experiment, Boren (1966) placed two Rhesus monkeys in separate operant chambers so that the two animals were visually and aurally isolated from one another.
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Generalists and Specialists Girl playing the violin

Generalists and Specialists

In a recent piece in the New York Times titled, “You Don’t Want a Child Prodigy: What ‘Roger’ Dads do Better Than Tiger Moms Ever Will”
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Invasive Fox in Henhouse

Invasive Behavioral Events: Lessons from Invasive Species

The stability of an ecosystem, including the species that occupy it, can be disrupted when an invasive species appears in it. Add a non-native predator to an environment and the result can be like adding a fox to a hen house: devastating.
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Intertwined Strings

Complex Behavior

“Complex” has two uses in psychology. One is to describe something with a lot of “moving parts.” Basically, something that has what Skinner described as multiple causes. This seems to be the definition behind the questionable saying that someone has a “complex” of one kind or another (e.g., an…
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Woman Working at Ceramics and Pottery Wheel

Out of Thin Air?

Ever think about where operant behavior comes from? What is it before that first reinforcer occurs? In speaking of the origins of operant behavior, Skinner famously observed that “[o]perant conditioning shapes behavior as a sculptor shapes a lump of clay.
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Cumulative Record - View of a desk

When in Doubt, Make a Cumulative Record

Contrary to a popular myth among many behavior analysts, Skinner invented neither the cumulative record nor the cumulative recorder. The origins of cumulative frequency plots, as they were known, date back to at least a couple of centuries ago, and now appear frequently in popular media. Consider, for example, the cumulative record below from an article in the British newspaper The Guardian,…
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Elderly Man Surprised Look

Behavioristic Bliss

Someone recently sent me a rather gloomy article titled, “Your Professional Decline is Coming Much Sooner Thank You Think.” The author,
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Woman Scolding Child in Store

Rules Rule, or Do They?

Rules are everywhere, from the Ten Commandments to those whose violations bring us into traffic court. It is no surprise that rule-governed behavior occupies such a prominent place in behavior-analytic theory. One perspective, on which there is no universal agreement, is that rules function as discriminative stimuli, setting the occasion for particular responses to be reinforced. I’d like to use…
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