INTERPRETING COGNITIVE PHENOMENA: REVIEW OF DONAHOE AND PALMER'S LEARNING AND COMPLEX BEHAVIOR1

Abstract

The thing that was exciting about Keller and Schoenfeld's Principles of Psychology (1950) and Skinner's Science and Human Be- havior (1953) as textbooks was their system- atic treatment.A few general, basic principles were introduced at the beginning, explained, and given empirical justification.Then those basic principles were used to interpret a wide range of interesting, significant, and complex behavioral phenomena such as conceptualizing, solving problems, remembering, talking, self-regulating, knowing oneself, and func- tioning as a member of a social group.Psychological phenomena that had seemed dis- connected from each other could now be discussed in common terms.A student who studied one of these textbooks could come away with a broad but integrated view of psy- chology as a coherent science.The approach, now known as behavior analysis, continues to be well integrated and broad in scope.But for some reason, this breadth is not always well represented in text- books.2Understandably and appropriately, basic textbooks focus on fundamental principles and on the research designed to clarify those principles.That body of research has grown enormously over the years, and the is- sues have become more intricate and subtle.It is hard to cover the basic principles ade- quately in a course and still find time to show the wide-ranging applicability of those prin- ciples to the interpretation of complex hu- man behavior.It may also be the case, as Dins- moor (1989) has suggested, that textbook authors have become more conservative in their willingness to extrapolate.Whatever the

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.