Increasing interest is being shown in how children develop an understanding of reciprocity in social exchanges and fairness in resource distribution, including social exchanges between third parties. Although there are descriptions of reciprocity on a one-to-one basis in other species, whether nonhumans detect reciprocity and violations of…

If judiciously applied, cognitive terminology can encourage further examination of phenomena in useful ways that may not otherwise be studied. I give examples of 3 phenomena, the study of which have benefitted from a cognitive perspective. For the first, transitive inference behavior, it appears that non-cognitive accounts cannot satisfactorily…

When behavior suggests that the value of a reinforcer depends inversely on the value of the events that precede or follow it, the behavior has been described as a "contrast" effect. Three major forms of contrast have been studied: "incentive contrast," in which a downward (or upward) shift in the magnitude of reinforcement produces a relatively…