BEH 5041 Unit 1 Outline Quiz

Introduction to Behavior Analysis

• Behavior Analysis is the science of learning, which is a relatively permanent change in behavior as a result of experience.
• Experience refers to an organism's interaction with the environment.

Examples of Learning

• Eating too many cheese puffs and experiencing nausea and vomiting, then associating the smell and sight of cheese puffs with nausea.
• Touching a red hot burner on a stove and getting burned, then avoiding red hot burners in the future.
• A baby babbling "mama" and being picked up and hugged by mom, resulting in consistently calling mom "mama".
• A sister asking a big brother to play and being ignored, then only asking the big brother to play from then on.

The Science of Learning

• Learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior as a result of experience.
• Learning occurs based on what happens before behavior, what happens after behavior, how much effort is required to do the behavior, and many other variables.

Definition of Science

• Science is a systematic approach to understanding natural phenomena, characterized by description, prediction, and control.
• Science relies on determinism as its fundamental assumption, empiricism as its prime directive, experimentation as its basic strategy, replication as its necessary requirement for believability, parsimony as its conservative value, and philosophic doubt as its guiding conscience.

Basic Assumptions of Science

• Empiricism: observing and recording the phenomenon of interest.
• Parsimony: the simplest explanation is usually the correct one (Occam's Razor).
• Philosophic Doubt: all knowledge is tentative, and being open to new data leading to new interpretations/explanations.
• Determinism: the universe is a lawful place.

Goals of Science

• Description: identifying the phenomena of interest.
• Prediction: forecasting what will happen under certain conditions.
• Control: influencing the phenomena of interest.

Human Curiosity and Knowledge

• There are three ways to obtain knowledge on how the world works: systematic investigation, experiment, and common sense/logic.
• Experiment involves manipulating variables (independent variables) and observing the effects (dependent variables).

Behavior and the Environment

• Behavior is what the organism is doing.
• The environment includes events, stimuli, and conditions that can affect behavior.

Human Receptors

• Receptors are sense organs that respond to energy changes in the environment (e.g., light, sound, heat, etc.).
• Examples of human receptors include:
  • Vision
  • Hearing
  • Smell
  • Taste
  • Cutaneous sense (skin and just below the skin surface)
  • Organic sense (deep sensations)
  • Kinesthesis (muscle sense)
  • Vestibular sense (balance)