buylotrogold

 Most cases?  Hardly.  The majority of operants can be brought under control of previously neutral stimuli.  Of course there is species specific behavior: Rats naturally run around in burrows, make use of auditory and olfactory cues and manipulate food with their forepaws, pigeons tend to peck for food and are highly visual. But it's neither the majority nor the most interesting behavior. Then I would suggest you take a look at the more recent work on operant conditioning, starting with Tinbergen (for the history), Garcia, Shettleworth, Hearst, Seligman, Holland, Bolles, Timberlake, Colwill & Rescorla, and Gallistel.  Ignoring the contribution of the organism unnecessarily narrows the focus of behavioral psyc

Often this entail having to punish the animal for an incorrect response (e.g. Lashley jumping-stand). No, punishment is the usual first sign of an incompetent trainer. Having to usually best described as so incompetent he couldn't figure out any other way to . Perhaps you should take a closer look at some of these operant paradigms before making these generalizations.  The consequences of an incorrect response in different operant paradigms vary and often it's the paradigms that require responses that are not part of the subject's natural repertoire that have the most severe consequences. In a simple bar-press, the consequence is no food pellet, in the Jumping-stand the rat falls into a net; in passive avoidance there's a shock, in a water-maze the water used is cold. No, I stand by what I said.  For instance take the example of the jumping stand.  If the behavior is maintained solely by avoiding falling into the net, indeed it's an aversive method (although negative reinforcement, not punishment)

It looks like that we are again getting into territory where we can argue indefinitly about who is right and who is wrong, but these point-counter point arguments tend to get hard to follow for everyone after a while, including the participants.  The idea I get from your last post is that we probably agree on many of the global points but not the specifics.  We can argue the specifics never accomplish anything, or we can get back to the point. Let me restate what I hoped I was saying and see if we can come to an agreement.  The original idea in the experimental analysis of behavior was to identify general principles of behavioral change/learning that would apply across all species and across all behaviors.  To do this, behaviorists sought to create an experimental environment where they could exert control over the behavior of the subject and assess the factors that led to behavioral change.  This was the contention since Thorndike, and is the implicit assumption for anyone who studies learning to look at general principles independent of the species (this includes myself).   Parallel to this was the study of the organism itself in ethology (Tinbergen for example) where species-specific behavior was the focus. Here the idea was to observe the behavior to determine the enviromental factors that influenced these behaviors and if to see if there were commonalities between species. A big difference in this approach is that much of it was done in the field so experimental control was not as strong (there are studies which simulate field conditions in the lab to get more control).  Both of these approaches can quite easily exist on their own, but some researchers have found that there is a profound interaction between them.  There is no doubt that the principles identified in behavioral psyc have a great degree of generalizability, but it's also the case that the principles can appear to be false when you require a response from the animal that is incompatible with its natural behavior

Eclecticism is never a flag that attracts many followers, but scientific chauvinism is likely to win the wrong battles.  (p 414 Weiskrantz, Analysis of Behavioral Change, 1968) Cute and relevant.  But it seems to me that the battle isn't between people.  It's between the best people you've got and Nature, fighting her tooth and nail to learn some of her secrets.

Oh, no argument!  I suspect that the knowledge gained about behavior (in my lifetime, at any rate) will be gained only by using both sorts of analysis.  For example I have a hunch that social behavior will only be understood with both analysis of mutual contingencies and observation of highly social species in their natural habitat. Actually, I don't see an argument here.  Surprisingly enough it seems that we've come to an agreement, and I thought this was doomed to mimic a Presidental debate Anyone else have any thoughts on this subject? Randy