The phrase “smoking–control therapy” covers many other different intervention types. Many if not most of them initially invoke aversive techniques as the main method to bring the client’s cigarette smoking down to a low daily rate. These aversive techniques directly address only one or two of the variables functionally related to smoking.
The question concerns life’s meaning. What is the meaning of life? This column also attempts answers which, though different, also may not seem satisfactory, at least to some people.
Consider virtually everyone’s typical reaction to a vending machine that fails to deliver the selected goods. You put in your money, push the button for your selection, and wait. Something is supposed to happen. The machine is supposed to deliver your goods, every time, on a continuous reinforcement schedule.
In this column we get to consider another example of shaping, one in which people and pigeons actually shape each other’s behavior. This time the criteria, regarding which responses get reinforced, change after each reinforcement as the “shapee’s” behavior also shapes the “shaper’s” behavior.
The words preclusion, extinction, and forgetting refer to different processes or procedures. Preclusion differs from extinction in a way similar to forgetting. While forgetting is a process, and extinction can be either a process or a procedure, preclusion is an intervention procedure that can help solve some types of behavior problems.
Certain problems with some terms demand our attention. For one, we tend to speak of stimuli as if they were things, and in some ways this makes sense. But the reality is more complex. To respect the interconnection between behaviorology, physiology, and other natural sciences, the term stimulus actually refers to an event, an energy trace that makes changes happen, beginning at a functioning receptor cell (or bundle of such cells) at a nervous system entry point. We can call the thing, related to that energy trace transfer, a stimulus. But this is a convenience, a verbal–shortcut.
The lower pen, which we call the event pen, records the onset and offset of experiment–defined events by going up one step after which it can only go back down one step. As the paper unrolls, this pen marks a line at two slightly different levels according to whether it has moved up or moved down its one allowed step.
