ABSTRACT

In the fall of 1959, Bill McGill introduced me to the theory of signal detection in a first-year graduate course at Columbia. I was hooked at once, and the hook is still holding firm . In my current version of McGill's course, I teach the classical theory, its fundamental challenge to the concept of threshold, and some of its elegant applications to vision and psychoacoustics, as well as recent behavioral versions of detection theory (e.g., Davison & Tustin, 1978). But what I really try to convey is something more general, which I will call here the signal-detection approach to quantitative behavior analysis. In its broadest terms, the signal-detection approach is concerned with the analysis of choice between discriminated operants-responses under the joint control of stimuli and consequences (Skinner, 1969; for a discussion in relation to signal detection, see Nevin, Jenkins, Whittaker, &

· Yarensky, 1982). The analysis involves separating the discriminative effects of the stimuli from the biasing effects of the consequences, each of which can be shown to be invariant with respect to variations in the other (see, e.g., Nevin, 1984). As such, it is a model of scientific analysis, and it has the further advantage of unifying two areas of behavioral research-stimulus control and reinforcement-that, although related, have long differed in their methods of analysis and styles of theory.