Crowdsourcing is a process in which a firm parcels out work to a "crowd" and offers payment for anyone within the crowd who completes the task determined by that firm. A growing number of behavioral scientists have begun using the Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to facilitate their research and practice, but there is apparently not one academic…

Robert Bostrom's seminal contributions to listening theory and research represent an impressive legacy and provide listening scholars with important perspectives on the complexities of listening cognition and behavior. Bostrom's work provides a solid foundation on which to build models that more realistically explain how listeners function…

Amid the novel terms and original analyses in Skinner's "Verbal Behavior", the importance of his discussion of multiple control is easily missed, but multiple control of verbal responses is the rule rather than the exception. In this paper we summarize and illustrate Skinner's analysis of multiple control and introduce the terms "convergent…

Aphasia is an acquired language impairment that affects over 1 million individuals, the majority of whom are over age 65 (Groher, 1989). This disorder has typically been conceptualized within a cognitive neuroscience framework, but a behavioral interpretation of aphasia is also possible. Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior proposes a…

Quantitative behaviour analysis requires the classification of behaviour to produce the basic data. This can be challenging when the theoretical taxonomy does not match observational limitations, or if a theoretical taxonomy is unavailable. Binary keys allow qualitative observation to be used to modify a theoretical taxonomy to produce a practical…

Classification "rules" in expert and everyday discourse are usually deficient by formal standards, lacking explicit decision procedures and precise terms. The authors argue that a central function of such weak rules is to focus on perceptual learning rather than to provide definitions. In 5 experiments, transfer following learning of family…

The development of the "Directories of Unpublished Experimental Mental Measures" is traced. Two decades ago, the senior author of this research began the compilation of a list of non-standardized experimental test instruments developed by behavioral and social sciences researchers. Making this information available was intended to help…