A Systems Approach to Behavior

Behavioral systems analysis: Methodological strategies and tactics

“…On the other hand, the integrated-field orientation recognizes the inherent (probabilistic) organization of the constituent elements in natural systems. This means that both response interdependence and stimulation-response interdependence is a given property, hence, responses are not dependent variables subject exclusively to external control (Henton & Iverson, 1978;Honig, 1959;Ray & Brown, 1975Ray, 1977;Upson & Ray, 1984). Clearly, single-response and isolated stimulus-response sequence methodologies are insufficient to reveal complex organismenvironment interdependencies; a multiple-component methodology is required.…”

“…Thus the two-dimensional array is typically used as a statistical estimation/summary device and is most often represented via a kinematic flow chart demonstrating the probabilistic organizational implications of element sequencing. Figure 5 illustrates kinematic flow in two settings (S+/S-) of a discriminative barpress experiment (Ray & Brown, 1975). Rats received water for each bar press occurring in the presence of house light "on" setting conditions (S+).…”

“…This is another way of saying the organization of kinematic transitions is not a random process, but one with systematic, although probabilistic, organization t o it. Thus, in addition t o a simple hierarchy in elements' unconditional probabilities (cf., Catania's 1984 "behavioral hierarchy"), there is also a hierarchical status to the conditional probabilities governing element- Ray and Brown (1975) depicting the conditional probability of behavioral sequences of rats under two different experimental settings. In the S+ setting rats were reinforced with water for each bar press, while in S-no bar presses were reinforced.…”

“…Syntactic variability, the index for kinematic complexity, is simply based on the number of different syntactical variations observed in a domain during a given time period (i.e., number of arrows in a kinematic flow chart). Thus in the Ray and Brown (1975) experiment depicted in Figure 5, S+ settings were associated with a syntactic variability index of 12, while Ssettings involved 25 different types of behavioral transitions, implying that training impacts not only element probabilities and element organization, but also organizational complexity as measured by kinematic variability. This, of course, was not the contingent aspect being reinforced, but nevertheless is an important part of the learned pattern of responding.…”

“…Ray and Brown (1975) introduced a measure of the rate with which elements in the behavioral domain change in time, and referred to it as behavioral flow rate, because they first assessed only the overt motoric domain of organisms. The way Ray and Brown computed behavioral flow rate was by expressing the number of behavioral element changes per unit time.…”