THE RESPONSE-STIMULUS CONTINGENCY AND REINFORCEMENT LEARNING AS A CONTEXT FOR CONSIDERING 2 NON-BEHAVIOR-ANALYTIC VIEWS OF CONTINGENCY LEARNING

This paper introduces a special section on the contingency. Bower and Watson were invited to present their views of contingency learning in human infants from outside the context of behavior analysis, and Cigal es, Marr, and Lattal and Shahan provided commentaries that point out s ome of the more interesting and controversial aspects of those views f rom a behavior-analytic perspective. The debate turns on how to concep tualize the response-stimulus contingency of operant learning. The pre sent paper introduces the contingency concept and contingency detectio n by subjects, as well as research practices in behavior analysis, in a context in which the dependency between infant responding and the pr esentation of environmental consequences may be disrupted through proc edures in which ordinarily consequent events occur before the response or in its absence. These points can relate to and serve as an introdu ction to the Bower and Watson papers on infant contingency learning as well as to the three commentaries that follow.