Differing views of contingencies: How contiguous?
Cognitive math about response-reinforcer closeness can tighten our descriptions of schedules and superstition.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The authors wrote a think-piece, not an experiment.
They asked: can behavior analysts borrow math tools from cognitive psychology?
The tools describe how closely a consequence follows a response.
The paper maps those formulas onto reinforcement schedules and superstitious behavior.
What they found
No new data were collected.
The team showed that cognitive contingency formulas can sharpen our talk about mixed schedules.
They argued the same formulas help explain why useless movements sometimes persist.
How this fits with other research
Leigland (2000) extends the idea. It plugs the same contingency logic into everyday conversation. Listener replies act like reinforcers in a behavior chain.
Catania (2021) later tested one assumption. Pilot data found that reinforcing one response property does not reliably boost that same property on the next trial. The result nudges us to question how local a contingency must be.
Harrison et al. (1975) supplies animal data that fit the call. Pigeons tracked moment-to-moment changes in payoff, showing organisms sense fine-grain probabilities.
Lyon (1982) gives the background map. It sorts superstitious, adjunctive, and functionally autonomous behaviors. The 1997 paper pulls superstition from that map and adds a quantitative lens.
Why it matters
You can borrow simple contingency math when a standard schedule analysis feels fuzzy. Try plotting the exact seconds between response and reinforcer in your next mixed-schedule case. The visual may reveal why the client shows superstitious hand-flap right before delivery. Share the plot with caregivers; numbers speak louder than jargon.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The contingency between environmental events and behavior has proven to be a useful concept in the study of both behavior and cognition. There is common ground in the definition of contingency in both domains, but interpretations of the basis of its action differ. For behavior analysts the contingency acts through both its direct, response-strengthening effect and indirectly through its function as a discriminative stimulus. Cognitive accounts, as represented in the work of both Bower and Watson, focus more on the organism's detection and interpretation of the contingency as the basis of its action. Despite such conceptual differences, Watson's quantitative descriptions of contingency effects seem relevant to feedback functions that describe reinforcement schedule performance and, as such, may bear on research involving combinations of response-dependent and response-independent food presentations and on superstitious behavior.
The Behavior analyst, 1997 · doi:10.1007/BF03392772