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Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior logoLink to Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior
. 1976 Jul;26(1):113–130. doi: 10.1901/jeab.1976.26-113

Organization in memory and behavior1

Charles P Shimp
PMCID: PMC1333494  PMID: 16811925

Abstract

Some common reinforcement contingencies make the delivery of a reinforcer depend on the occurrence of behavior lacking significant temporal structure: a reinforcer may be contingent on nearly instantaneous responses such as a pigeon's key peck, a rat's lever press, a human's button press or brief verbal utterance, and so on. Such a reinforcement contingency conforms much more closely to the functionalist tradition in experimental psychology than to the structuralist tradition. Until recently, the functionalist tradition, in the form of a kind of associationism, typified most research on human learning and memory. Recently, however, research on human memory has focused more on structural issues: now the basic unit of analysis often involves an organized temporal pattern of behavior. A focus on the interrelations between the function and structure of behavior identifies a set of independent and dependent variables different from those identified by certain common kinds of “molar” behavioral analyses. In so doing, such a focus redefines some of the significant issues in the experimental analysis of behavior.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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