IIExpectancyll: Sieight-of-Hand Mentalism, Not Mechanism or Process

Jeffrey Fagen (1993, this issue) has misunderstood our main point about reinforcement as a central principle of behavior change (Gewirtz & Pelaez-Nogueras, 1992, p. 1414) and the issue of description versus explanation in the use of the objective reinforcement term or of a subjective term such as contingency expectancy. He argued that reinforcement cannot explain some findings of his and his colleagues' infant research and that the higher order mechanism of expectancy is the major process that can account for those results. We will raise no critical questions about the complex methodology of the two experiments to which Fagen alludes, nor about the fact that those experiments may involve more the influence of extinction-following-reinforcement and discriminative-stimulus constancy versus change than reinforcement itself. However , issues of parsimony will prompt us to question the necessity of moving beyond basic reinforcement and derivative principles for the fool's gold of intrapsychic concepts such as the violation of contingency expectancy to explain the infant behavior changes resulting from operant-learning procedures. This questioning is especially warranted in the absence of implementation of independent operations of any sort by Fagen (and his associates) to attain leverage on the violation of contingency expectancy assumption central to his case. We did not claim in our article (Gewirtz & Pelaez-Nogueras, 1992) that all behavior is learned through operant reinforcement contingencies. Obviously, numerous learning processes exist that can change infant behavior (e.g., habituation, respondent conditioning). Our attempt was to identify key processes of infant learning and behavioral development. Throughout the article, we used the term reinforcement to describe the relations between infant responses and (often reciprocal) environmental contingencies and contextual determinants of behavior (that include organismic factors).. It can be constructive at this point to reexamine what reinforcement is and what it is not. Reinforcement is a central operant principle in behavior analysis. It is descriptive , not explanatory. But reinforcement is not the sole principle of behavior..;malYsis that Fagen's (1993) critique mistakes it to be. Reinforcement simply organizes descriptively the straightforward effects of the provision of environmental contingencies that increase systematically the rate, amplitude. duration, or some other attribute measure of the response. Even so, in operant learning not every behavior change need result from reinforcement. Di verse other behavior-analysis processes that result from, or are independent of, the reinforcement process can influence behavior change. Among others , these processes include stimulus or response generalization, conditioned reinforc-ers and punishers, …