ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the stimulus control of behavior and multiple schedules of reinforcement. It focuses on stimulus control, behavioral neuroscience, and understanding perception and explains the problem of the "bird-brained" pigeon and implications for teaching and learning. The chapter presents research and discusses stimulus conditions that set the occasion for operant behavior—changing its probability of occurrence. The simplest way to establish stimulus control and train a differential response or discrimination is to reinforce an operant in one situation and withhold reinforcement in the other. Learning of social referencing also involves discrimination of social cues, which signal that reaching for an ambiguous object may result in punishment. Behavior analysts often use multiple schedules of reinforcement to study stimulus control in the laboratory. There are several alternative interpretations of behavioral contrast. For example, when reinforcement is reduced in one component of a two-component multiple schedule, habituation to the reinforcer is less, resulting in more effective reinforcement in the unchanged component.
