From simple to complex stimulus control using animals in laboratory settings

Stimulus control of behavior is customarily treated as a fairly simple matter, turn on a discriminative stimulus and a behavior that has previously been reinforced in the presence of that stimulus will follow. Such control develops rather quickly. But there are many additional features of stimulus control that are complex and highly dependent on particular aspects of the procedure or three-term contingency. A very basic distinction is between S-Dee (stimulus with reinforcement of a response) and S-Delta (stimulus with no reinforcement). The presentation will give examples of both types of stimulus control in settings with intermittent reinforcement of stimulus control, chaining of stimuli and responses, discriminative control by reinforcement, discriminative control of variability, and reversal of stimulus control. Stimulus control has been studied for decades in the laboratory using animals, and translation of basic research findings to clinical settings is very important.