Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 1

Gibson, Skinner, and the Notion of Stimulus in the Analysis of Behavior

Andrés García-Penagos

Delta State University

Author’s note: e-mail agarciapenagos@gmail.com

I want to thank K. Andy Lattal, John C. Malone, Todd Freberg and Gordon Burghardt for comments on

earlier versions of this manuscript.

 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 2

Gibson, Skinner, and the Notion of Stimulus in the Analysis of Behavior

The operant laboratory is the source of incredible advancement in a science of behavior, a

point that I am generally ineffective in conveying to the freshmen students that take myE Introduction

to Psychology courses. Despite my best attempts, they often have a lot of difficulty in seeing how rats

pressing levers or pigeon pecking keys have anything to say about what they do every day. That being

said, the point seems to be a little bit more understandable now that smartphones and video game

consoles are ubiquitous, somehow.

As in any other science, I tell my skeptical students, the operant laboratory does not resemble

everyday life. The operant laboratory acts as a world in miniature, but a simplified version of it, and in

that respect at least the experimental analysis of behavior is not different from any other natural

science. The operant box has been incredibly fructiferous in understanding the lawful principles of

behavior, a point that should be obvious but still needs to be argued for in most psychology

departments. In fact, I might add, the operant box has been too successful, to the point that to those

of us who are convinced of its relevance it might be just as difficult to “think outside of the box.” In

particular, I think that thanks to its straightforward power as a methodological tool, our field as a

whole in all its three variants (the experimental analysis of behavior, applied behavior analysis, and

radical behaviorism) has been afflicted by the so-called law of the hammer (attributed sometimes to

Abraham Maslow): “I suppose it’s tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything

as if it were a nail” (Maslow, 1966/2002).

The problem lies in overlooking the heavily impoverished version of the world that an operant

box, at least in its traditional form, involves. A single, food-deprived organism, in a closed, and

sometimes clean encasing, white noise in the background, one or two lights, a lever, a food
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 3

dispenser, maybe a bottle of water. And functionally, a prearranged schedule of reinforcement linking

the manipulation of the operandum to the delivery of food, often involving a couple of SD’s or (S’s).

For (legitimate) analysis purposes, in the box we can clearly describe the three-term contingency: SD-

R-S+. For the same legitimate purposes, as long as everything is running normally, the life of that

organism outside the box is of little importance. In everyday life, however, we might easily realize

that the distinctions are often blurry, as they should be.

More importantly for the point of this paper, because the emphasis has traditionally been on

the scheduling of contingencies and the description of behavior under such conditions, a relative

neglect exists in our field in regard to the understanding of the nature of stimulation, even when it

occupies a whole third of the reinforcement contingency. It’s somewhat paradoxical that some of the

authors in the field of stimulus control start their chapters by arguing that in everyday life stimuli are

always present. The problem is old, and certainly not exclusive of behavior analysis. Many

philosophers and psychologists throughout history have talked of minds essentially isolated from the

world, existing in a vacuum, brains in vats and the like.

I will propose in this essay that not only behavior analysis has not done enough to counter

this “poverty of the stimulus” zeitgeist, but also that quite often we as well have been snared to the

same trap. To illustrate this point, I will review some of the key aspects of the theoretical and

methodological approach developed by James J. Gibson, ecological psychology, and further reflect on

what I consider some undesirable effects of having a molecular notion of stimulus. I will briefly review

Gibson’s views, will contrast them with those of Skinner as representative of the typical approach in

the analysis of behavior, and will suggest that some of the conceptual problems in radical
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 4

behaviorism and its implications in the science and technology of behavior might to some extent be

untangled by considering at least some aspects of the Gibsonian view.

James J. Gibson and the Direct Perception Theory

James J. Gibson (1904-1979) majored in philosophy in Princeton University where he also

obtained his PhD in experimental psychology. He was certainly influenced by pragmatism and

Watsonian behaviorism, an influence that probably was solidified by way of his contact with

philosophical behaviorist Edwin B. Holt, a student of William James, and who was his advisor. As a

faculty member, years later, Gibson would become a colleague of Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka,

which undoubtedly influence many of his later ideas. He would devote the rest of his career to the

scientific study of perception. His research and ideas were published in a large number of articles,

and, particularly, in three books, each corresponding to a different direction of his theory. Lombardo

(1987) suggests that Gibson’s ideas developed in two different stages. The first one corresponded to

a psychophysical phase (roughly between 1930 and 1960), which can be aptly summarized in his first

book, The Perception of the Visual World (1950). The second period Lombardo calls ecological, and

includes his two other books, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966), and The

Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979). It is in this second phase in his thought that the

influence of evolutionary thinking is more obvious and important. It is for this reason that most of the

remaining discussion will be focused in his last work.:

Gibson’s theory of perception has been considered radical and revolutionary (e.g., Noë, 2004).

By way of historical heritage, Gibson’s views can be safely classified in the larger tradition of

American naturalism that includes the writings of William James and John Dewey, \as well as those of

Edwin B. Holt. This tradition, as is well known, is a genuine product of Darwinian thinking applied to
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 5

psychological concerns. A full introduction to this theory is beyond the purposes of this essay, but

the reader will find a complete description of his views and ideas in a number of reviews (e.g., Ben-

Zeeb, 1981; Hamlyn, 1977; Heft, 2001; Mace, 1986; Nakayama, 1994; Neisser, 1977; Reed, 1988;

Shapiro, 2019). I will discuss, however, some of the key concepts of his theory.

While Gibson’s ideas developed in different phases, as mentioned above, the first aspect of

Gibson’s approach to perception that I want to emphasize is that it is wholly naturalistic and, in at

least some respects, reactionary: his theory of information pickup was proposed as an alternative to

all the traditional theories of perception, which according to him are based at least to some extent in

the assumption that “perception is the processing of inputs […] sensory or afferent nerve impulses to

the brain” (Gibson, 1979, p. 251). According to this traditional view, as discussed by Gibson, stimuli

provoke sensations, perception occurs next, and knowledge occurs last, after inputs have been

decoded, organized, interpreted, or subjected to any other process that transforms them into a

meaningful representation. This is the view more commonly expressed in introductory psychology

textbooks: “Perception is the only bridge we have to the world. Without it we would be prisoners in

the loneliest of solitary confinements […] it is the processing, organization, and interpretation of

sensory signals that result in an internal representation of the stimulus” (Gazzaniga & Heatherton,

2006, pp. 160-161).

Gibson rejected this view early in his career (Ben Zeeb, 1981), and proposed to replace it

completely. According to Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981), his position “is presented as an outright denial

of every aspect of the computational account, not merely as a reformulation of parts of it” (p. 140;

italics added). In Gibson’s early ideas “perception is a function of stimulation and stimulation is a

function of the environment; hence perception is a function of the environment” (Gibson, 1959, p.
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 6

459), and although this notion of perception changed in his later writings to include a more active

role of the perceiver (Gibson, 1979; 1982), his theory is above all a theory of ‘what is to be

perceived,’ that is, an environmentally-centered theory. Gibson rejected the existence of cognitive

activities prior to or concurrent with perception and argued that the richness and complexity of

perception is to be found in stimulation rather than inside the organism (Michaels & Carello, 1981).

Fundamental to understand this idea is the notion that the perceiver is not a stationary witness but

rather an active agent who is moving constantly relative to the environment, as well as moving its

eyes and head (Goldstein, 1981). As a consequence, perception for Gibson is not a physiological or

mental act, but “a fact of an ecosystem” (Lombardo, 1987, p. 3).

According to Lombardo (1987), this ecological shift in the views of Gibson ran parallel to his

increasing interest in evolution and the dynamic process of adaptation of animals to their

environments. The core idea in his views is that of the mutuality or reciprocity of organism and

environment, an idea that is indeed similar to those of J. von Uexküll (1985, 2010; cf. Susi & Ziemke,

2005). This emphasis in the mutuality of organism and environment is best exemplified by Gibson’s

emphasis in the notion that stimulation is rich in information, and hence the environment affords

behavior.

The concept of information in Gibson’s work is related to what he perceives as a lack of a

clear definition of stimulus and stimulation in general (Gibson, 1960). For Gibson, traditional notions

of stimuli in terms of elemental physical variables, such as intensity and wavelength—closely related

to the language of sensations—are largely unsatisfactory. According to Gibson (1979), color, form,

location, space, time, and motion are not what is perceived. Rather, what organisms mainly perceive

are places, objects, substances, and events (i.e., changes in places and objects). It is for this reason
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 7

than in his view sensation—understood as a response to abstract, elementary variables such as

‘redness’—does not precede perception but is rather a consequence of it. What are perceived are red

objects, and a response to ‘redness’ is more the product of experimental procedures, and in

consequence, I argue, sensations can be considered ‘artificial.’

Related to this redefinition of sensation is the idea that stimulation involves not energy but

information (Chemero, 2003b). Gibson (1979) was well aware of the possible confusions that can

originate in the term, stating that he would use another term if he could (p. 242), but not finding any

other term to replace it he tries to cleanse it from all the common-sense baggage meaning. In his

approach, “information consists of invariants underlying change” (Gibson, 1982, p. 399), “information

is structure carried in the media by the light, mechanical energy, or chemical energy” (Mace, 1986, p.

139), that is, to Gibson environments are informative: stimulation specifies an environment to an

organism, so that no further elaboration in the form of cognitive processes is necessary on the part of

that organism (Michaels & Corello, 1981).

Gibson (1979) emphasized that information is not something that goes out from of the

environment and into the subject, and moreover, that it is nothing that can be stored or even

processed. Rather, argues Gibson, information is in the environment, and the organism is active in

trying to extract it from stimulation: exploring, looking, listening, tasting, and sniffing are

adjustments to the environment that occur in perception: “information is not conveyed but extracted”

(Gibson, 1982, p. 398). Moreover, not only organisms exist in a rich sea of information about their

environments, but also, and consequently, the structure and function of the perceptual systems have

evolved to adapt best to the available information, which links Gibson’s position to evolutionary

theory.
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 8

The second core concept in Gibson’s theory is that of affordance (Gibson, 1979; Greeno,

1993; Mace, 1991; Reed & Jones, 1982; Turvey et al, 1981). The term is a neologism created by

Gibson to emphasize the fact that the environment enables the organism to do things, to emit

behavior: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or

furnishes, either for good or ill” (Gibson, 1979, p. 127). There is a current debate on what exactly it is

that the environment affords (see e.g., Chemero, 2003; Heft, 2003; Jones, 2003; Michaels, 2003), but

whatever the case, according to Gibson they are the most important event that is perceived. When we

see a hammer, for example, we not only see an object, but we perceive what we can do with it, for

example, grasp it. The affordances are objective properties of the environment, of course, but they

are not objects in the physical sense of the word. Rather, they are potentialities, or in behavioral

terms, possible stimulus functions. The concept, even if difficult to grasp, has important

consequences, not the least of which is that affordances constitute properties of the environment

relative to an organism, which denotes the interdependency of environment and organism in his

theory. Affordances are necessarily historical, as they depend on previous behavior relative to

environmental events. Hence, for Gibson, not only no animal is ever isolated from its environment,

but it is just as true that in an important sense environments do not exist without organisms; notice

that for Gibson the world exists independent of our perception of it, but environments, as

stimulation, only exist if an organism responds to them1. This is an idea certainly congenial to von

1
Gibson was an ardent advocate of realism, which he felt was a necessary consequence of his approach to perception.
Remember also that he was a student of a “new realist,” E. B. Holt. A full discussion of Gibson’s views is beyond the scope
of this paper, however.
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 9

Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt. As von Uexküll (1985) puts it: “Without a living subject, there can be

neither space nor time” (p. 52).

Ecological Psychology: Contemporary Issues

While the ideas of Gibson and his students have consistently remained in the minority position

within the field of sensation and perception, a resurgence in the interest on these ideas and their

relevance to other fields has been occurring over the last couple of decades. First, renewed

importance has been given to behavior in the understanding of evolution. Second, Gibsonian ideas

have become foundational to the philosophy of mind that is called 4E cognition.

Withagen and Chemero (2009) argue that evolutionary concerns are fundamental to the

ecological approach to perception. They argue that the notion of affordances allows for an

understanding of adaptive behavior that does not require complex inferential or representation

processes. Such representational processes might actually be harmful in situations like predator

avoidance, as they require an immediate response. Gibsonian theorists, particularly E.S. Reed, have

argued for a more direct definition of Gibson’s views in evolutionary terms, particularly with the idea

that affordances and their relative availability are to be understood as exerting selection pressures on

organisms (Reed, 1982, 1985; Withagen and van Wermeskerken, 2010). According to Reed, this

availability or unavailability of affordances gives origin to a variety of action systems which evolve as

a function of how adaptive they are to benefit from such affordances. For Reed, convergent evolution

is the main evidence of this fact: selection pressures deriving from an affordance lead to the evolution

of different action systems in different organisms to benefit from the afforded resources.

As Withagen and van Wermeskerken (2010) point out, however, Reed’s views are ambiguous

regarding the mutuality or organism and environment, seemingly suggesting that affordances exist
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 10

prior to organisms. To solve this ambiguity, these authors suggest that attention be paid to

Lewontin’s views that organism and environment are inseparable, a view that they consider congenial

to Gibson’s2. Furthermore, they encourage a serious consideration of Lewontin’s idea that rather than

adapting to environments, organisms construct them, a notion that is exemplified in Laland and

colleagues’ niche construction theory (see also, von Uexküll, 170 2010).

According to Withagen and van Wermeskerken, niche construction theory and the ecological

approach to perception are not only compatible but might be relevant to each other. Affordances,

they argue, can indeed be seen as the “context of selection,” in the sense of being a result of the co-

evolution of behavior and environments: “In their struggle for survival and reproduction, animals

compete for affordances, and the animals that are better in exploiting the affordances than their

competitors have a greater chance of producing offspring” (p. 502). Furthermore, the animals’

alteration of the environment requires, Withagen and van Wermeskerken argue, both the perception

and the exploitation of affordances, and also the creation and destruction of affordances in the shape

of a modified environment that can be inherited to offspring. In this way, not only can affordances be

placed in an evolutionary context, but they can also in turn help us to understand what niche

construction is: an alteration of affordances in the environment.

Gibsonian ideas are one of the main influences in the development of recent approaches to

cognitive science that are often summarized under the label of 4E cognition, and which include the

2
These views predate Lewontin’s work, a fact that Withagen and van Wermeskerken (2010) apparently ignore. The idea of
organism-environment mutuality can be more precisely attributed to J. von Uexküll (1985, 2010) and his notion of Umwelt
and functional or performance tones. Take as an instance this quote: “Only to the superficial eye does it seem as if all sea
animals were living in a homogeneous world common to all of them. Closer study teaches us that each of these myriad life
forms possesses an environment particular to it that is mutually derived by the construction plan and the animal itself” (von
Uexküll, 2010, p. 223).
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 11

areas of embodied, extended, embedded (situated) and enactive cognition. In fact, in light of Gibson’s

anti-representational stance, and similarities between his ideas and those of phenomenologist

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the concept of affordance is central to the attack that the most radical among

these positions make against mainstream cognitive science (e,g., Chemero, 2010; Gallagher, 2018;

Noe, 2004), with the understanding that a complete understanding of the mutuality of organism and

environment, as well as an understanding of the affording function of the environment the need to

postulate internal representations to describe animal behavior becomes superfluous.

Behavior Analysis and the Theory of Direct Perception

The similarities between Gibson’s approach to perception and behavior analysis have been

noted by critics both within and without those fields. For example, Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981) stated:

“The problem that we are raising against Gibson is, to all intents and purposes, identical to one that

Chomsky (1959) raised against Skinner […] it becomes apparent how similar in strategy are Skinner’s

antimentalism and Gibson’s” (p. 143, footnote 2). Also, Noble (1981) noted the similarities in their

approach to cognition and a relatively pragmatic orientation common to both authors. To the best of

my knowledge, the earliest formal statement of the relation between the two fields is the review of

Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception by A. P. Costall (1984) in the Journal of the

Experimental Analysis of Behavior.

Costall recognized many parallels between the work of Skinner and Gibson: (a) an

epistemologically based anti-cognitivism and anti-representationalism; (b) a rejection of S-R

 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 12

psychology, to be replaced by functional and more molar levels of description3; (c) the view of the

organism as active rather than a passive receptor of stimulation; (d) the view that behavior is lawful or

at least can be lawfully described, and that these laws “refer to an irreducible organism-environment

relationship (sic)” (p. 114); and (e) an interest in the reconstruction of cognitive theorizing and

constructs in naturalistic terms.

Guerin (1990) also suggested that the positions of Gibson and Skinner include many

similarities, and suggested that the tendency to talk in terms of discrete stimuli is a result of

confounding perceptual responses with verbal responses (especially, tacts) which are under abstract

stimulus control (hence reducing stimulation to the particular abstracted stimulus dimension). Guerin

proposed that in light of such strong similarities a common front should be created by linking the

views of Skinner and Gibson to redefine topics such as memory and to dissuade neuroscientists

against the search of engrams, insofar as memory involves environmental affordances.

More recently, Morris (2003) has argued that Gibson’s theory is one of a few fields that is

ontologically compatible with behavior analysis, and that the two approaches would do good in

mutually recognizing each other’s perspectives, proposing an alliance. Morris also commented on the

relation between the two areas in another review (Morris, 2009), identifying both as holistic,

contextual, and molar (p. 281). Unfortunately, in my view, these reviews have been limited to

signaling parallels, but have not done much in the way of mutual enrichment. It is my contention that

behavior analysis provides Gibsonian theory with a framework to understand perceptual learning (that

3
This sense of the term ‘molar’ is broader here than the one in common use in current analysis of behavior and should not
be confused with it. By rejecting a molecular S-R behaviorism, Skinner can be considered a molar theorist in the sense here
used.
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 13

is, how stimulus control is acquired) in providing a rich understanding of consequences and hence

offering a “natural history” of affordances. In fact, and in light of the debates surrounding the notion

of affordance itself, a case can be made that the decades work on stimulus control and related areas

might provide a better definition. I will also make the argument that a Gibsonian look to the problem

of stimulus control can in turn enrich behavioral explanation. In order to do so, I will briefly review

now behavior analytic approaches to perception, with a particular emphasis on the views of B. F.

Skinner.

Skinner on Perception and the Gibsonian Alternative

Skinner’s views on perception are to a large extent unknown to contemporary perception

investigators. Multiple reasons can be given for this fact, but probably the most accurate is that with

the exception of one chapter in About Behaviorism (Skinner, 1974), his treatment of perception

appeared only as sparse comments (Knapp, 1987). A common theme in Skinner’s approach to

perception is related to a criticism to traditional theories of perceiving, which he described under the

term ‘copy theory.’ These criticisms are very similar to those advanced by Gibson (1979), who

referred to the problem as that of “the little man in the brain.”

Skinner (1953) first talked about the issue in discussing private events, and particularly what

he called private seeing: “It is usually held that one does not see the physical world at all, but only a

nonphysical copy of it called ‘experience’ […] occurring in a special world of “consciousness” where

[…] it can nevertheless often be seen” (p. 276). Skinner (1974; 1978) noted that this theory is more

common with visual stimuli and attributes the notion to the Greeks. Of course, Skinner finds the idea

lacking in explanatory power: if an internal copy is accepted, then how this inner perception occurs

would also have to be explained. Moreover, he says: “At some point the organism must do more than
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 14

create duplicates. It must see, hear, smell, and so on, and the seeing, hearing, and smelling must be

forms of action rather than of reproduction” (Skinner, 1988, p. 285).

Thus, for Skinner as for Gibson, perceiving is action rather than the passive reception of

inputs. Action in the Skinnerian context is to be understood in terms of the three-term contingency

of reinforcement, which comprises (a) a discriminative stimulus, (b) a response, and (c) a

consequence. Perception is then understood in these terms as discriminated operant behavior, that is,

behavior under the discriminative control of a stimulus by way of differential reinforcement. Hence it

can be concluded that in behavior analysis ‘stimulus control’ and ‘perception’ can be used

interchangeably. As argued by Knapp (1987), in Skinner’s approach the complexity of perception lies

not in the phenomenon per se, but in the complexity of the contingencies, and this includes special

cases such as “contemplation”: What is reinforced in contemplation, which involves mere looking but

not doing? Even in this case, according to Skinner, a number of behaviors under the control of the

stimulus are involved and that control is due to differential reinforcement (Knapp, 1987).

Other topics related to perception discussed by Skinner include those related to imagination,

fantasies or dreams. This is the analysis of conditioned and operant seeing: if seeing is interpreted as

a response, then it is legitimate to suppose that both respondent and operant contingencies can

affect it (Skinner, 1953; 1979). In this way, Skinner argues, one can respond to things in their

absence in a variety of ways: one might “see” something when in the presence of any stimulus that

has frequently accompanied the original event (conditioned seeing). Likewise, when seeing behavior

is reinforced, behavior precurrent and concurrent to seeing might also be reinforced.

Two reasons seem to me to be operational in why Skinner’s views on perception are largely

ignored. First, the mainstream of perception theory and research is cognitive and representational,
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 15

and thus approaches such as Skinner’s will probably be unappealing, as were for some time those of

Gibson. The second reason, I propose, is that in Skinner’s treatment of perception, no reference is

made to previous research, nor to most of the phenomena that are studied therein, with the resulting

impression that research in that field is unimportant or irrelevant to his analysis of perception as

behavior. This extreme position can make his analysis look naïve, uninformed, or, worse, pejorative.

Skinner’s omission is understandable, as much of the perception research is largely mentalistic, but

at the same time, by ignoring this previous research it makes it difficult for perception theorists to

see what the advantages are in such a position. What different predictions can be made from these

ideas that are not already in traditional theories?

It would appear that in emphasizing the distribution of behavior in time as a function of its

consequences Skinner had little to say about the antecedent stimulation side of the contingency. As

has been suggested by others, his emphasis on reinforcement downplays the role of stimulation

(Dinsmoor, 1995a, 1995b). Stimuli in this way play three functions: they can be either unconditioned,

conditioned, or discriminative. Skinner certainly was aware of limitations of this analysis and

discussed in some detail more “molar” sources of stimulation, for example in discussing the role of

the “audience” in verbal behavior, as I will discuss later. Still, and in particular when discussing

perception, the notion of stimulus for Skinner is unfortunately restricted to the types of stimuli

manipulated in the laboratory, and thus even when used to interpret phenomena outside the

laboratory these are considered punctual, discrete units. I will illustrate this problem with two

examples.

First, in his interpretation of verbal behavior (Skinner, 1957), he uses the term discriminative

stimulus to refer to a variety of situations that range from particular objects, to a listener and an
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 16

audience, and to prior verbal stimulation, which, in addition, is identified not functionally but

topographically. His analysis of verbal episodes, although interactive, involving responses by both

speaker and listener, consists of a series of arrows connecting responses and discriminative stimuli

from both interlocutors in an almost linear way. This fragmented behavioral episode is the prototype

to describe all verbal operants, which exist, so to speak, independently from each other, and which

are linked together by the introduction of a different type of verbal operant, a second-order operant

called the autoclitic, verbal behavior under the control of the other verbal operants. The concept of

autoclitic has multiple functions in his theory of verbal behavior, in particular as a sort of glue that

keeps together different verbal operants, but is problematic for a number of reasons that cannot be

explored in depth here, but that include their status as antecedent environmental events, and their

functional status: How are, for example, autoclitics reinforced? Can responses by the same individual

be considered a discriminative stimulus for him or herself? I argue that the postulation of autoclitics,

regardless of its heuristic value, corresponds to the logical necessity of filling gaps between fractured

verbal episodes rather than to genuine verbal operants as defined by Skinner, and in doing so,

autoclitics have an ambiguous conceptual role.

A second problem with Skinner’s relative neglect of stimulation and his views on perception

has to do with the old problem of private events. Skinner (1953; 1957; 1979), talks about these

events in terms of private responses and private stimuli. According to his view, they are not

problematic as they are controlled by the same variables as public events. But, how is one to say if a

private event is a stimulus or a response? Are pain and hunger stimuli? Can a private response be a

further stimulus for additional responses? Skinner’s analysis of private events was ambiguous, but in

general most of his use of the term is to refer to physiological events, as a toothache. For Zuriff
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 17

(1985), these events can be classified as hypothetical constructs, and for Schnaitter (1984), the

allowance of these events makes his position compatible with mentalism.

In both of these cases, what I identify as problematic is the logical violation of the concept of

stimulation compared to how it is used in the operant box. In the particular case of private events, I

think that defining them as either private stimuli or responses creates more problems than it answers

and merely distracts from what should be important, which is the interaction with the world. Should

we, for instance, be worried about whether dreams are stimuli or responses?

In summary, what I suggest is that a direct translation of laboratory concepts, as the notion of

discriminative stimulus, to interpretation of everyday behavior in naturalistic settings is at best

problematic. It is, first, technically imprecise: the strict definition of discriminative stimulus in the

laboratory can only be applied to everyday situations by inferring similar histories of reinforcement.

Behavioral scientists, I argue, should be aware of the risks of assuming a posteriori a history of

reinforcement for which there is little evidence. The use by Skinner (1957) of a concept with so little

experimental support as that of generalized conditioned reinforcement as the typical consequence of

most verbal operants is an example of this. I’m not arguing that reinforcement is not the principle

controlling everyday events, but I do think that rough translations of precise laboratory terms to

everyday situations needs to be done with consideration to the possibility of stretching strict

experimental concepts beyond their conceptual and technical limits.

I propose then that behavior analysis would benefit of deeper consideration of perception or

stimulus control. Although research on stimulus control research in behavior analysis enjoyed an

increase in past decades, in the case of nonhuman animal research in this area is scarce and not
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 18

rarely is explained in representational terms (see, for example the special edition of JEAB [2002], on

categorization and concept learning).

Paradoxically, much of the move to mediational, cognitive accounts of stimulus control is

related to the use of increasingly complex stimuli, a tradition that is largely due to the experiments

by Herrnstein, Loveland and Cable (1976), showing that pigeons discriminated pictures of trees,

bodies of water, and people. Fetterman, Stubbs and MacEwen, (1992) have noticed how in some cases

discrimination of seemingly incredibly complex stimuli are more, or at least as rapidly acquired than

those of seemingly simple stimulus as a red keylight. I call this paradoxical, because rather than

supporting a representational approach, the fact is predictable from a Gibsonian approach: abstract

properties as “redness” are not what is perceived, but rather objects, substances, and events.

Differential responding to abstract stimulus dimensions would be more difficult and possible only by

extensive training.

This approach predicts a different pattern of behavior than a behavior-analytic approach just

by assuming a broader view of stimulus. For Gibson (1960; 1979), a stimulus is nothing but a brief

and discrete application of energy to a sensitive surface, but it is an irrelevant concept. What is

important is not a stimulus, but stimulation which is a completely different matter. Stimulation

involves informative stimuli: the light impinging on the pigeon’s eye informs it about a

transilluminated surface, but also about an aluminum wall with other things on it, surfaces that afford

pecking. The pigeon is not a passive receptor: it moves, it moves its head, it scans the floor of the

box in search of kernels, looks alternatively between two keys, pecks differently if it is food what it

will receive, etc. It is those patterns of action that, for Gibson, constitute perception: the active

extraction of information coming from an environment rich in information.

 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 19

It is true that Skinner held relatively similar and certainly compatible views, but the notion of

informative environment was not fully developed in his theory, leading to what I argued were

problematic interpretations of complex everyday behavior. For Gibson (1979), for example, because

the body is also a source of stimulus information there is as well always proprioception

accompanying perception: an interrelation between environment and action perception involves

always information about the perceiver activities. Exteroception and proprioception always occur

together:

“An individual not only sees himself, he hears his footsteps and his voice, he touches

the floor and his tools, and when he touches his own skin he feels both his hand and his skin

at the same time. He feels his head turning, his muscles flexing, and his joints bending. He

has his own aches, the pressures of his own clothing, the look of his own eyeglasses—in fact

he lives within his own skin.” (Gibson, 1979, p. 115)

That is, in my view, a radical departure from Skinner’s view on private events. In one sense,

for Gibson all activities are private, I argue, and feeling a pain is not more private than moving one’s

head, or moving one foot after the other to walk. There is then, no problem of privacy in his theory,

because there is nothing like an isolated perception of a supposed private stimulus. Private events

cannot be classified as stimuli or responses. They are part of the environment, and as such, bodily

functions are informative and afford behavior. And they are not isolated sources of information, but

occur simultaneously to information coming from the larger environment.

For Gibson, perception is continuous, not fragmentary. I think, accordingly, that the problem

of the ‘causation’ by a private event is rather pseudo-problem originated in thinking that behavior

under the supposed control of such an event is a function of only that event. Pain, however, does not
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 20

occur in vacuum: what ‘causes’ pain behavior is to a large extent a function of the larger context: a

soldier in danger can escape even with a major injury, but someone with a minor injury can be more

impaired when in a hospital.

My point is that rather than mutual deference the two approaches would benefit of a more

active appropriation of each other’s knowledge base. Ecological psychology would probably benefit

from behavior analysis in clearing the notion of affordance. Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior

would also benefit of a more serious consideration of what the stimulation for verbal behavior is. For

example, whether a phoneme, a word, a sentence, or larger units are the source of control depends

particularly in the larger context: whether you are in a spelling bee context, or reviewing the literature

for a conceptual paper.

A new approach to stimulus control may be in order also in experimental research. Not only

the use of more naturalistic stimuli seems to be recommended from a large extent of research (e.g.,

Bouton, 2007; Cook & Wasserman, 2006), but also recent research invites a new look at the notion of

stimulus. Sidman’s (1985) analyses of four- and five-term contingencies, for example, suggest

stimulus functions different from discriminative control. Also, a series of experiments has determined

that contingencies between responses and reinforcers can as well have discriminative functions, that

is, pigeons and other animals discriminate the actual contingencies of reinforcement (see Lattal,

1995, for a review). In other words, relations involving responses and consequences can control

behavior in ways in addition to the response-strengthening effect of the response-reinforcer

dependency. Another oddity in our field is that whereas views regarding the relation between

responses and reinforcers as molar are popular, even for these molar views antecedent stimuli are
 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 21

still interpreted in molecular terms. Stimulation for Gibson is necessarily a molar phenomenon

(Gibson, 1960).

A further area where a closer look at Gibson’s views is likely to be fruitful is in the conceptual

or philosophical analysis of behavior. First, due to the historical factors that influenced Gibson’s

theory, it provides a bridge to other psychologies and philosophies, including William James’ radical

empiricism, E. B. Holt’s neorealism, Gestalt and ecological psychology (Heft, 2005), Brentano’s act

psychology, and Dewey and Mead’s pragmatic theories of knowledge (Noble, 1981). Additionally,

Gibson made a strong case for direct realism (Reed & Jones, 1982): for Gibson, the theory of

information pickup provides epistemological reason to support the idea that there exists a reality and

the senses (understood as perceptual systems) provide knowledge of it (but cf. Morris, 2009). In its

radical departure from representationalism, realism and pragmatism are not antithetical terms, as has

been suggested, and so I argue that it allows realism within an obviously contextual framework

(Morris, 1988).

Conclusion

Gibson has rejected various features of the traditional view of perception. Whereas his

position is not without his critics (e.g., Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1981; Ullman, 1981), these criticisms are

not very different from those aimed at behavior analysis. Gibson’s anti-representational ideas are key

to the current rise in 4E cognition as a serious contender to traditional cognitive science of the

information-processing tradition. Less attention has been given in these views to the rich

accumulation of knowledge about the role of consequences in the allocation of behavior from the

science of behavior that is the experimental analysis of behavior.

 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 22

Gibson’s approach does not invalidate the bulk of research on behavior analysis that includes

lights and sounds as stimuli. Rather, it invites further exploration of conceptual issues that have been

unresolved in the history of psychology and that could be the anchor of a naturalistic psychology in

the future. For this reason alone, I think, it merits deeper consideration. In fact, given the

epistemological and ontological similarities between the two approaches, a case can be made for the

complementarity of both approaches, with ecological psychology emphasizing the richness of

stimulation and behavior analysis emphasizing the richness of behavior and consequences. I think

that such complementarity should be translated into conceptual revision in both fields so as to

produce a coherent challenge to representational/mediational approaches to cognitive science.

 Ecological Psychology and Behavior Analysis 23

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