Behavioral Inquiry
Where modern topics meet behavioral research
Month: January 2017
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Self Report Studies: Self-report studies; you see them all the time online: surveys, polls, and questionnaires. You even see them on your receipts after you order a coffee. Your opinion counts. People want your social data. Some of these are used for marketing, and others are just done for the fun of it. The reason…
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What is Stimulus Pairing? What why is it important? I would describe it this way. If you wanted to understand the foundation of how we learn (or any creature with a complex nervous system or brain), then stimulus pairing would be one of the first building blocks of the process you would come across. It…
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Stimulus Control The term we are going to talk about today is a pretty important one; Stimulus Control. It’s a term used in behavioral psychology (behaviorism) to describe the relationship between an antecedent stimulus (setting, etc), and the control (or altering effect) it has over the behavior that follows it. Another way to phrase it is,…
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It’s all about the non-verbal cues. You’ve heard the Dr. Mehrabian quote, right? “Communication is only 7 percent verbal and 93 percent non-verbal.”. [1] Well, according to his work, there’s a lot to be said about what goes unsaid. Out of that 93%, 55% is body language, and the other 38% is tone of voice.…
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Recap time! Do you remember what a reinforcer or reinforcement is? Reinforcement is the process by which a consequence (reinforcer) strengthens the rate of a behavior, in the same or similar context in the future. Learning through success. [1] Do you also remember the previous subject we were reviewing called “Belongingness” by Thorndike? Belongingness was…
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“Belongingness” in Behavioral Theory First, some context! When we look at behavioral psychology, a great deal of it came up as a philosophical model in the late 19th/early 20th century, which gained traction for the following 60 or so years. One of these original scientists/psychologists who contributed was named Edward Thorndike (1847-1949), who had a…
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Applied Behavior Analysis can use a lot of jargon and technical terms for things we see day to day, and it’s sometimes necessary to use extra words to put distinct meanings to phenomena we see and study. It’s also important to distinguish between them. ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) terminology can be tricky. Today I had…
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Reinforcement or reward? Have you ever heard the term reinforcement (in the context of learning or psychology) and wondered what it might mean? Reinforcement, as was originally studied, was a term that came about in behavioral psychology to describe the phenomenon of a consequence event strengthening the behavior that came before it, and increasing the…
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The Function of Our Behaviors When we look at patterns of behavior, they can for the most part fall in to four categories: Access, Escape, Attention, and Sensory. Why do we do what we do? And why do we do it again? The study of the functions of human behavior, and the factors that make…
Behavioral Inquiry 