ABSTRACT
Operant psychology started with a meal. This chapter aims to focus on different points in Skinner’s original analysis of feeding. It considers whether Skinner’s use of the reflex as the unit of analysis was a felicitous choice, examines the “orderly periodicity” of eating reported by Richter which stimulated Skinner’s analysis. The chapter explores whether operations other than fasting and feeding control the pattern of meal taking. Richter’s early observations showed that rats distributed their feeding in episodes which can be regarded as discrete meals. The feeding episodes were distributed as discrete meals of varying size. The reduced frequency of meals resulting from increased ratio requirements is associated with a compensatory increase in the size of the meals. At low ratios, meal frequency was somewhat higher than that normally observed when powdered chow is fed. The most attractive conjecture is that the subject’s termination of the meal is the critical event.
