The Hefferline Notes: B. F. Skinner's First Public Exposition of His Analysis of Verbal Behavior.

Moss (2009) dug up the mimeographed notes from Skinner’s 1947 Columbia class. These are the first written pages where Skinner listed the verbal operants.

Hefferline, a student, typed what Skinner said. The paper cleans up the old text and shows how each operant was first explained.

The notes give the first paper version of mand, tact, echoic, intraverbal, and autoclitic. Skinner’s 1957 book later used the same list.

The wording is plain. Teachers can still hand the notes to students today.

Andery et al. (2005) looked at Skinner’s 1945 shift. They showed he moved from talking about “meaning” to talking about environmental causes. Moss (2009) picks up two years later and shows the first written list that used that new view.

Fryling (2017) later asked if the operants really work alone. He used the same list from the Hefferline notes and said we should test it in kids. The 1947 list is still the base map.

Rudy Zaltzman et al. (2022) took the list into a clinic. They taught a child with autism a vocal chain and saw new tacts pop up through observation. The old lecture notes now guide therapy.

You can print the Hefferline notes and use them as a cheat sheet when you teach verbal behavior. The words are short and clear. Keep a copy in your staff training folder. When a supervisor asks why you split mand and tact, point to the same list Skinner gave rookies in 1947.