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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Doors One Open

Behavior Analysis’s Not-So-Secret Agent

Psychologically speaking, an agent is an entity responsible for a course of action. Some psychological agents with which many of us are familiar are “personality,” “conscience,” “self,” and “stress.” Each of these agents is said to be responsible for behavior: 
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Directional Sign Post

A Signal Experience

I recently found myself caught up in a great discussion with two colleagues, both of whom I highly respect, concerning a particular term that we see in many places in our science. The discussion centered around whether or not it is good Behavior-ese to describe a discriminative stimulus as signaling the availability of reinforcement.
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Man in office staring into space

Immedium and Procrastinium: A Fable in Waiting

 Once upon a time, there were twins named Immedium and Procrastinium. As their names might suggest, the two approached tasks very differently. When a deadline was assigned, Procrastinium’s first reaction was to do something else, while Immedium started on it and soon got it done, PDQ, kazaam, what’s next?
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Sailor holding a compass

Stay the Course?

Persistence is a topic of folk wisdom and behavioral science. Admiral Farragut’s “Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead!” or sayings like “Never say die” all point to staying the course, even when it’s rough. Behavioral psychologists have, for a very long time, been interested in the circumstances under which behavior does or does not persist. Our recently deceased outstanding colleague Tony Nevin…
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Circular maize with ball

What’s Free About the Free Operant?

There is another question to be answered before considering the question in the title of this commentary: “What is a free operant, anyway?” It is an expression that sometimes appears in talks and articles, but it isn’t as commonly used as it once was. Free operant originally described an experimental
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Girl holding stopping with hand

Treating Dangerous Behavior

Dangerous behavior simply can’t be ignored. The person engaging in it is going to either hurt herself or someone else if it continues. Saying that is easy, knowing what to do about it is a rabbit hole. At what point does the behavior become more than “disruptive” and cross the “dangerous” threshold? How long does one try something like ignoring (extinguishing) the response before trying something…
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3 rats in a cage

Behavior in Translation

Have you ever heard a paper presented at a conference or elsewhere about research with rats or pigeons, and it seems like the findings might be helpful in working with your clients? But then you wonder, is there really a connection between the two? How do people know if a basic behavioral process applies to what we are observing with our clients?
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Graphic of 2 brains with different colors

Psychology Spectrum Disorder (PSD)

In a famous article entitled “Are Theories of Learning Necessary,” published in 1950, Skinner examined the broad spectrum, that is, psychology, and presented it to the 
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five people sitting in a row of chairs, the third person is sitting on the back of the chair instead of the seat

Pragmatism and Playing Well with Others

Many applied behavior analysts find themselves in a different world from that in which they were trained. Most are trained by other behavior analysts in programs or even departments where the principal worldview is that of behavior analysis.
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A child with electrodes on their head for a brain scan

Measuring Thoughts

“Neuroscientists Decode Brain Speech Signals into Written Text.” If you suspect that the National Enquirer wrote this recent newspaper headline, you would be wrong.
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A dog holding a leash looking around an open front door

Agency and Shaping

Shaping, or the differential reinforcement of successive approximations, is thought by many to be the most important tool in the behavior analyst’s toolbox. Shaping is usually thought of as something one human does to change the behavior of another living organism, most often to a human but also to a pet or a laboratory subject of the nonhuman persuasion. In such cases, the human is the agent of…
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A magnifying glass over an icon of a person

A Self-ish Behavior Analysis?

I just googled the word “self”: 3,540,000,000 hits, more or less. That’s three-point five billion, just to be clear. Wow.
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