ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some processes or mechanisms of antecedent control. Antecedent control of behavior by the environment is one of the oldest facts of behavioral science and a target of all its explanatory models. The control of behavior by its antecedents has earned a variety of labels, for example, evocation, elicitation, stimulus control, antecedent control, ecological control, and contextual control. A much more complex model of antecedent control is the operant conditioning technique most often attributed to Skinner. In operant analysis, a stimulus that signals the likely consequences of a response is usually termed a discriminative stimulus: Its presence discriminates when the response will have one sort of consequence or another. In organisms capable of language—which the days include primates in certain sign-language training programs—one simple instruction can be a stimulus control and can create stimulus controls. The complex model notes that most behavior is determined by its consequences and is changed by changing its consequences.
