The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior at zero, fifty, and one hundred.
JEAB’s core reinforcement-schedule science is stable, but fresh stats and verbal-behavior work are the next frontiers.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Catania (2008) read every issue of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior.
He compared the topics published in 1958, 2008, and what might come by 2058.
The goal was to see which basic science lines stayed strong and which faded.
What they found
Reinforcement-schedule and human-subject studies stayed steady for 50 years.
Papers on aversive control dropped off.
The author hopes future work will dig more into verbal behavior and how brand-new responses first appear.
How this fits with other research
Kelly (1973) is an example of the steady line: pigeons’ inter-response times shifted when the schedule changed.
Young (2019) and Barnard-Brak et al. (2022) show the hoped-for future: new Monte-Carlo and SCED stats tools now sit beside classic schedule work.
Clarke (1998) and Hackenberg (2018) echo the call for more verbal-behavior and translational reviews, showing the gap Charles noted is already being filled.
Why it matters
You can trust that schedule-based tactics you use today rest on a 50-year lab backbone.
When you write up data, borrow the new stats apps from Young and Barnard-Brak to stay cutting-edge.
Push your own questions toward verbal behavior and response novelty—Charles says the journal still wants them.
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Download the free Monte-Carlo shiny app from Young (2019) and test it on your last single-case dataset.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The experimental content areas represented in JEAB in its first volume (1958) and 50 years later in Volume 87 are in many ways similar with regard to research on schedules of reinforcement, research with human subjects, and several other topics. Experimental analysis has not been displaced by quantitative analysis. Much less research on aversive control has been published in recent than in earlier years. Wishes for progress in the next 50 years include experiments on verbal behavior, the sources of novel behavior, and observing responses based on stimuli correlated with escape or avoidance.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2008 · doi:10.1901/jeab.2008.89-111