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. 1994 Spring;17(1):43–57. doi: 10.1007/BF03392652

A descriptive taxonomy of environmental operations and its implications for behavior analysis

Henry D Schlinger Jr, Elbert Blakely
PMCID: PMC2733693  PMID: 22478172

Abstract

Environmental operations may be classified according to whether they have evocative or function-altering effects. Evocative events, such as the presentation of unconditioned and conditioned stimuli, establishing operations, and discriminative stimuli, serve to increase, decrease, or maintain the momentary frequency of behavior. Function-altering operations, such as operant and respondent conditioning, the correlation of stimuli, and the presentation of certain verbal stimuli, serve to increase, decrease, or maintain the evocative and function-altering (e.g., reinforcing or punishing) functions of other events. This paper expands upon the functional taxonomy of environmental events described by Michael (1993a). The resulting classification scheme should permit behavior analysts to more easily respond to similarities and differences between functional environmental events. This paper discusses implications of the suggested taxonomy for how behavior analysts talk about motivational variables, discriminative stimuli, the operant unit of analysis, and the distinction between operant and respondent conditioning.

Keywords: evocative functions, function-altering operations, respondent conditioning, operant conditioning, units of analysis, determinism

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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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