Abstract

RIBES INESTA, Emilio. Some Observations about "Stimulus Control". Acta de investigación psicol [online]. 2011, vol.1, n.1, pp.121-131. ISSN 2007-4719.

Some thoughts on the concept of stimulus control in operant conditioning theory and in particular on the concept of a discriminative stimulus are presented. The paper presents the logical and definitional problems regarding the use of the concept of stimulus in general and of a discriminative stimulus in particular. Several experiments conducted by the author are presented to exemplify the logical and empirical inadequacies of the concept of discriminative stimulus to account for a series of data.

Keywords : Discriminative stimulus; States; Temporal schedules; Signal.