Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an American psychologist, behaviorist, inventor, and social philosopher. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.
Philosophy of psychology is concerned with the history and foundations of psychology. It deals with both epistemological and ontological issues and shares interests with other fields, including philosophy of mind and theoretical psychology. Philosophical and theoretical psychology are intimately tied and are therefore sometimes used interchangeably or used together. However, philosophy of psychology relies more on debates general to philosophy and on philosophical methods, whereas theoretical psychology draws on multiple areas.
Radical behaviorism is a "philosophy of the science of behavior" developed by B. F. Skinner. It refers to the philosophy behind behavior analysis, and is to be distinguished from methodological behaviorism—which has an intense emphasis on observable behaviors—by its inclusion of thinking, feeling, and other private events in the analysis of human and animal psychology. The research in behavior analysis is called the experimental analysis of behavior and the application of the field is called applied behavior analysis (ABA), which was originally termed "behavior modification."
Richard Julius Herrnstein was an American psychologist at Harvard University. He was an active researcher in animal learning in the Skinnerian tradition. Herrnstein was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology until his death, and previously chaired the Harvard Department of Psychology for five years. With political scientist Charles Murray, he co-wrote The Bell Curve, a controversial 1994 book on human intelligence. He was one of the founders of the Society for Quantitative Analysis of Behavior.
George Armitage Miller was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and more broadly, of cognitive science. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics. Miller wrote several books and directed the development of WordNet, an online word-linkage database usable by computer programs. He authored the paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," in which he observed that many different experimental findings considered together reveal the presence of an average limit of seven for human short-term memory capacity. This paper is frequently cited by psychologists and in the wider culture. Miller won numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science.
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understand the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental events. The cognitive revolution of the late 20th century largely replaced behaviorism as an explanatory theory with cognitive psychology, which unlike behaviorism examines internal mental states.
Ned Joel Block is an American philosopher working in philosophy of mind who has made important contributions to the understanding of consciousness and the philosophy of cognitive science. He has been professor of philosophy and psychology at New York University since 1996.
The cognitive revolution was an intellectual movement that began in the 1950s as an interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes, from which emerged a new field known as cognitive science. The preexisting relevant fields were psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, neuroscience, and philosophy. The approaches used were developed within the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, and neuroscience. In the 1960s, the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies and the Center for Human Information Processing at the University of California, San Diego were influential in developing the academic study of cognitive science. By the early 1970s, the cognitive movement had surpassed behaviorism as a psychological paradigm. Furthermore, by the early 1980s the cognitive approach had become the dominant line of research inquiry across most branches in the field of psychology.
The term standard social science model (SSSM) was first introduced by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in the 1992 edited volume The Adapted Mind. They used SSSM as a reference to social science philosophies related to the blank slate, relativism, social constructionism, and cultural determinism. They argue that those philosophies, capsulized within SSSM, formed the dominant theoretical paradigm in the development of the social sciences during the 20th century. According to their proposed SSSM paradigm, the mind is a general-purpose cognitive device shaped almost entirely by culture.
Leda Cosmides is an American psychologist, who, together with anthropologist husband John Tooby, pioneered the field of evolutionary psychology.
John Tooby was an American anthropologist who, together with his psychologist wife Leda Cosmides, pioneered the field of evolutionary psychology.
Stephen Michael Kosslyn is an American psychologist and neuroscientist. Kosslyn is the president of Active Learning Sciences Inc., which helps institutions design, deliver, and assess active-learning based courses and educational programs. He is also the founder and chief academic officer of Foundry College, an online two-year college.
Paul Montgomery Churchland is a Canadian philosopher known for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. After earning a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh under Wilfrid Sellars (1969), Churchland rose to the rank of full professor at the University of Manitoba before accepting the Valtz Family Endowed Chair in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and joint appointments in that institution's Institute for Neural Computation and on its Cognitive Science Faculty.
Melioration theory in behavioral psychology is a theoretical algorithm that predicts the matching law. Melioration theory is used as an explanation for why an organism makes choices based on the rewards or reinforcers it receives. The principle of melioration states that animals will invest increasing amounts of time and/or effort into whichever alternative is better. To meliorate essentially means to "make better".
Howard Rachlin (1935–2021) was an American psychologist and the founder of teleological behaviorism. He was Emeritus Research Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology at Stony Brook University in New York. His initial work was in the quantitative analysis of operant behavior in pigeons, on which he worked with William M. Baum, developing ideas from Richard Herrnstein's matching law. He subsequently became one of the founders of Behavioral Economics.
Quantitative analysis of behavior is the application of mathematical models--conceptualized from the robust corpus of environment-behavior-consequence interactions in published behavioral science--to the experimental analysis of behavior. The aim is to describe and/or predict relations between varying levels of independent environmental variables and dependent behavioral variables. The parameters in the models hopefully have theoretical meaning beyond their use in fitting models to data. The field was founded by Richard Herrnstein (1961) when he introduced the matching law to quantify the behavior of organisms working on concurrent schedules of reinforcement.
In behavioral psychology, stimulus control is a phenomenon in operant conditioning that occurs when an organism behaves in one way in the presence of a given stimulus and another way in its absence. A stimulus that modifies behavior in this manner is either a discriminative stimulus or stimulus delta. For example, the presence of a stop sign at a traffic intersection alerts the driver to stop driving and increases the probability that braking behavior occurs. Stimulus control does not force behavior to occur, as it is a direct result of historical reinforcement contingencies, as opposed to reflexive behavior elicited through classical conditioning.
Hans-Lukas Teuber was a professor of psychology and head of the psychology department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was one of the founders of neuropsychology and studied perception. He coined the term double dissociation. He also introduced the "Corollary Discharge" hypothesis. He gave the classic definition of agnosia as "a normal percept stripped of its meaning".
Theoretical behaviorism is a framework for psychology proposed by J. E. R. Staddon as an extension of experimental psychologist B. F. Skinner's radical behaviorism. It originated at Harvard in the early 1960s.
Clive D. L. Wynne is a British-Australian ethologist specializing in the behavior of dogs and their wild relatives. He has worked in the United States, Australia, and Europe, and is currently based at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. He was born and raised on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England, studied at University College London, and got his Ph.D. at Edinburgh University. He has studied the behavior of many species - ranging from pigeons to dunnarts, but starting around 2006 melded his childhood love of dogs with his professional training and now studies and teaches about the behavior of dogs and their wild relatives.
