Novelty, stimulus control, and operant variability.
Novel behavior is ordinary variability that reinforcement history has brought under stimulus control.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Williams et al. (2002) wrote a theory paper. They asked: where does brand-new behavior come from?
They used basic ABA ideas—stimulus control, reinforcement, and response variation. No new data were collected.
What they found
The authors say novelty is just old variability that cues and consequences have shaped.
In short, new behavior is not magic; it is selected variation under stimulus control.
How this fits with other research
Fryling (2017) extends the same logic to verbal operants. He shows that mand, tact, and intraverbal forms may overlap once similar cues and consequences control them.
Hansen et al. (1989) push the idea further. They map logical reasoning itself onto verbal operants under environmental control, giving novelty a voice.
de Rose (1986) supplies the engine. His three-part definition—instructional control, equivalence classes, and autoclitics—explains how novel verbal forms are generated and selected.
Why it matters
If new responses are simply variation brought under stimulus control, you can program them. Arrange cues that evoke slight variations, reinforce the useful ones, and watch novel, adaptive behavior grow. Use this view to plan mand-tact-intraverbal instruction, problem-solving tasks, or creative play goals.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Although behavior analysis has been criticized for failure to account for response novelty, many common behavior-analytic concepts and processes (e.g., selectionism, the operant, reinforcement, and stimulus control) assume variability both in the environment and in behavior. The importance of the relation between variability and novelty, particularly for verbal behavior, is discussed, and concepts used to account for novel behavior are examined. Experimental findings also are reviewed that suggest that variability in behavior can come under discriminative control, and these findings are applied to describe novel instances of behavior that may arise during problem solving. We conclude that variations provided and selected by the terms of the three-term contingency are powerful means for understanding novel behavior.
The Behavior analyst, 2002 · doi:10.1007/BF03392056