Cognitive neuroscience from a behavioral perspective: A critique of chasing ghosts with geiger counters.
Brain pictures dressed in mind-talk give you fake causes—keep your language on behavior and environment.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Faux (2002) looked at brain imaging papers that talk about memory, attention, or fear circuits.
The author asked: Do these papers explain behavior, or do they just rename it with brain words?
This is a theory paper, so no scans, no kids, no trials—just a close read of the words.
What they found
The papers swapped mind-words for brain-words and called it an explanation.
That trick builds a ‘conceptual nervous system’—a ghost story with colorful pictures.
The author says: Stick to what the person does and what happened right before and after.
How this fits with other research
Thompson (2008) seems to disagree—he uses focal brain data to pick kids for self-awareness ABA.
Look closer: Travis still defines self-awareness as autoclitic behavior, so the clash is only skin-deep.
Otrebski (2005) extends the same warning with the mereological fallacy: don’t give brains the job of whole people.
Barrett (2016) updates the chase—from ‘ghosts with Geiger counters’ to ‘brains-as-computers’—but the fix is the same: talk action, not hardware.
Why it matters
When you read ‘His amygdala caused the tantrum,’ swap it to ‘No attention followed the scream.’ Then you can change the attention, not the amygdala. Teach staff the same swap and your treatment plans stay in the real world.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Cognitive neuroscience is a growing new discipline concerned with relating complex behavior to neuroanatomy. Relatively new advances in the imaging of brain function, such as positron emission tomography (PET), have generated hundreds of studies that have demonstrated a number of interesting but also potentially problematic brain-behavior relations. For example, cognitive neuroscientists largely favor interpretations of their data that rely on unobserved hypothetical mechanisms. Their reports often contain phraseology such as central executive, willed action, and mental imagery. As B. F. Skinner argued for decades, cognitive constructs of neurological data may yield nothing more than a conceptual nervous system.
The Behavior analyst, 2002 · doi:10.1007/BF03392055