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The field's major accomplishment is its most generic one: Establishing EAHB as a valid arena for investigating operant processes. Through the slow accumulation of data, we've reached the point where we see relatively few objections that humans are simply "too messy" to take seriously as subjects. Indeed, EAB seems to have a growing appreciation that humans are worth studying, and require special skills to study; the most direct evidence of this is that, in a sort of de facto quota system, JEAB now consciously staffs its editorial board with investigators of human behavior. Another sign of general success is that, as our data accumulate, we hear fewer appeals to special principles to account for human behavior. Finally, we're seeing more and more papers aimed at contributing directly to the advancement of an area of investigation, rather than simply examining whether principles established with animals can be generalized to humans. The above is prerequisite to almost any other kind of success I can think of, but at this still-early stage I can come up with more promises yet unfulfilled than I can specific successes. These include: 1. An inability to generate a critical mass of investigators. The EAHB literature is contributed to by a relatively small number of laboratories. The people working in those labs can't do justice to the many pressing topics begging for investigation. Moreover, with relatively few labs comes inadequate variability in method and theory. Most of the problems cited below (2-5) might be traced, in part, to the staffing problem. 2. Failure to make much headway in studying verbal behavior. Precious little basic verbal behavior research appears in behavioral journals, and what we see (including my own stuff) is often not very interesting compared to the myriad complexities in a conceptual analysis like Skinner (1957). This illustrates one way in which we haven't done enough to address Hake's (1982) call for the study of "uniquely human phenomena." 3. Failure to follow through properly on interesting breakthroughs. EAHB has a faddish quality. At one time there was lots of instructional control research; it has virtually ceased, but not because the critical questions were settled. We had a boom of stimulus equivalence research, but as the work got harder -- i.e., as it began to bump up against tough questions about underlying mechanisms, or as it was extended to consider relevance to language, conceptual behavior, etc. -- all but a few labs seem to have dropped out of the game. What will be the next fad? There are signs that it will be temporal discounting, but I predict that the same boom/bust cycle will play out there as well. 4. Inadequate attention to stimulus control. Aside from stimulus equivalence, stimulus control hasn't been given its proper due in EAHB. In part, this mirrors a trend in the animal literature, where many stimulus control researchers defected and became "animal cognition" investigators. Thus, many questions about complex stimulus control (e.g., "memory;" interference;" "concept formation;" etc.) are addressed by people in other domains, often with other species. In fairness, one nice side effect of the stimulus equivalence boom has been new attention in some labs to fundamental stimulus control issues -- the work on stimulus control topography at the Shriver Center is the paradigm example. This is great stuff, and exactly the sort of thing we need more of. 5. Failure to make connections with psychologists outside of behavior analysis who study human behavior. These people tend to be empiricists, and many are interested in seeing data and theory if they think it will help them to understand the phenomena they are studying. Moreover, many of these people have something of potential value to offer EAHB. For instance, psycholinguists who study self-editing and other "speech repairs" have developed experimental methods for generating and measuring these verbal events. Some human cognitive psychologists interested in concept formation have examined the role of familiar variables in this process (consequences; signal-detection relations), and have worried about the adequacy of group-level data in portraying the relevant effects. Moreover, they've done so with verbally-loaded behavior of far greater face validity than that typically studied in EAHB. We could view relationships with these people as a vehicle for technology transfer. Look at the many positive benefits that resulted from interactions between investigators of human and nonhuman stimulus-class formation (e.g., Zentall & Smeets, 1996); both areas of research improved, and EAHB gained credibility with a new audience. No reason to think this couldn't happen more widely. If it did, not just EAHB, but EAB and behavior analysis generally, would profit. Hake, D. F. (1982). The basic-applied continuum and the possible evolution of human operant social and verbal research. The Behavior Analyst, 5, 21-28. Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Zentall, T. R., & Smeets, P. M. (Eds.).
(1996). Stimulus class formation in humans and animals.
Amsterdam: North Holland.
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