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.
Dissing Ability
Tuesday, 12 May 2020
Blogger: Andy Lattal, Ph.D. Suddenly, an observable response pattern—reading—is turned into an internal state. Too many times I have read in both student and professional papers something to the effect that “the child had the ability to solve the problem” or “the pigeon had the ability to discriminate…” Three problems render such expressions untenable and therefore
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Catch-Up Contingencies
Friday, 08 May 2020
Blogger: Andy Lattal, Ph.D. 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. This happens even at the cultural level in that sometimes society recognizes that the way things have been done is in the long-run
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When Punishment is a Reinforcer
Wednesday, 29 April 2020
Blogger: Andy Lattal, Ph.D. 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
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Obsessing Over OCD in these Days of COVID-19
Thursday, 16 April 2020
Blogger: Andy Lattal, Ph.D. “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. Not only that but also spraying packages from Amazon with Lysol and using that stuff on doorknobs and everything else metallic or cardboard or other
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What is Social Behavior?
Tuesday, 07 April 2020
Blogger: Andy Lattal, Ph.D. 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. His was an experiment on mutual reinforcement, so the schedules were arranged such that Rhesus A’s responses produced reinforcement only for Monkey B and Rhesus
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Generalists and Specialists
Friday, 03 April 2020
Blogger: Andy Lattal, Ph.D. 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” by David Epstein, the author weighs the relative merits of raising children as “specialists,” focusing on one skill at which they excel, as in musical and sports prodigies,
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Invasive Behavioral Events: Lessons from Invasive Species
Tuesday, 24 March 2020
Being vigilant and attuned to the threats of invasive species and invasive behavioral events may be the best thing that can be done. Keeping them out is important, but when they appear, managing them early seems critical.
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Complex Behavior
Tuesday, 10 March 2020
“Complex” has two uses in psychology. One is to describe something with a lot of “moving parts.” The other use of complex is “I don’t understand it.”
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Out of Thin Air?
Tuesday, 03 March 2020
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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When in Doubt, Make a Cumulative Record
Wednesday, 26 February 2020
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.
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