ABSTRACT
A textbook on learning, or psychotherapy, or educational psychology, or animal behavior, or industrial psychology is likely to be deemed deficient to the degree that it makes little or no mention of B.F.Skinner’s views. Yet no contemporary textbook on the subject of perception contains a chapter, segment, or paragraph on the views or contributions of B.F.Skinner, or for that matter on the contributions of those who research and publish under the banner of the experimental analysis of behavior. The circumstances are much the same for those books which bear titles such as Cognition or Cognitive Psychology. It is as if the person regarded by historians as responsible for the second most significant development in psychology since World War II (Gilgen, 1982) had nothing to say on the matters taken up by such textbooks. Does radical behaviorism have nothing to contribute to an understanding of perceptual processes? Are perceptual processes (or the physics and physiology which underlie such behavior) largely irrelevant to the goals of radical behaviorism? Have psychologists, for whatever reasons, simply ignored what Skinner and workers in the experimental analysis of behavior have had to contribute to the field of perception? Is there little value in a behavioral analysis of the problems of perception?
