Saturday, March 12, 2016

April 13, 2014



April 13, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 
 
I have just woken up from a wonderful sleep. As I went into the office, Kayla, our cat, walked with me and greeted me, by touching my legs. When I sat down, she sat on my lap and began purring, while occasional turning her pretty face to me. She squinted with her eyes and seemed perfectly in tune with my good mood. I love our cat. Yesterday, as I was standing in the kitchen and was talking with my wife Bonnie, Kayla was at the other side of the living room. She saw me standing near the fridge and came running into the kitchen. Then she jumped on the counter, on me and then on top of the fridge, where she sat in her little bamboo basket. It was so funny that my wife and I were laughing. Kayla likes to use us as a stepping stone to jump to higher places. However, this doesn’t always work out though. Not too long ago, I was in the office standing near the book shelves. She wanted to jump on me and  then onto the shelves. I didn’t want her to knock over the pictures which are on the shelves, but she had already decided to jump on me and she scratched my shoulders and that was very painful and annoying. 


Today I will give another seminar. Bonnie and I had nice work out this morning and we went to have lunch together afterwards. We ate Chinese: spicy ribs and chow fung and took home the left overs in a little box. It tasted delicious. Today I will experiment with Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) in a way that I haven’t done before. I will still describe SVB and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), but then, as a discriminative stimulus, I will hold up my left hand or my right hand to indicate that we are having SVB or NVB. This nonverbal signal is hypothesized to avoid lengthy explanations and get everybody aboard a bit quicker. Also, I will let others raise their left or right hand so that we all begin to discern it from each other. This new form of discrimination learning seems more pragmatic to me than using verbal explanations to refer to the nonverbal.

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