Children may recruit their teachers' attention at undesirably high rates or at inconvenient times. Tiger and Hanley (2004) described a multiple-schedule procedure to reduce ill-timed requests, which involved providing children with two distinct continuous signals that were correlated with periods in which teacher attention was either available or…

This paper is a draft for the American Psychological Association Symposium on the conditioning of verbal behavior and attitudes. The author presents the results of several studies he conducted in the classical conditioning of meaning and attitude. These studies attempt to control the measurement effects created by extraneous variables operating on…

Michael (1975) reviewed efforts to classify reinforcing events in terms of whether stimuli are added (positive reinforcement) or removed (negative reinforcement). He concluded that distinctions in these terms are confusing and ambiguous. Of necessity, adding a stimulus requires its previous absence and removing a stimulus its previous presence.…

Reinforcers lose their effectiveness when they are presented repeatedly. Early researchers labeled this loss of effectiveness as "satiation" without conducting an experimental analysis. When such an analysis is conducted, "habituation" provides a more precise and empirically accurate label for the changes in reinforcer effectiveness. This paper…