November 16, 2014

November 16, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

The following is a response to “The Role of Atomic Repertoires in Complex Behavior” (2012) by D.C. Palmer. He explains that in humans, atomic repertoires may “short circuit” the “many cycles of blind variation and selection.” This evolutionary principle is of interest to this writer, who considers Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) as two atomic repertoires. 

There is adaptive value to the expression of safety and trust as well as danger and threat, there are nonverbal and verbal aspects of verbal behavior that must be considered. The discriminative stimulus that brings about SVB or NVB is the sound of our voice and its automatic reinforcing effects.  As this writer looked for “Other examples of atomic repertoires” he found the section “Echoic Behavior” in which Palmer refers to automatic reinforcement, describing it as a “special case of imitative behavior, special because people with normal hearing can hear themselves speak immediately and faithfully.”

Echoic behavior explains why SVB can only occur in situations of safety and trust, which allow for the “shaping of much finer grained response topography than other imitative behavior, because any discrepancy between the echoic response and the antecedent stimulus is relatively conspicuous.” NVB is a different atomic repertoire, in that one-trial learning results from the reflexive response to danger and threat. SVB involves operant repertoir, but NVB involves mainly respondent repertoir.  

         

Palmer’s paper reminded this author about a documentary he saw on TV a while ago. It was about fish, who swim toward places in the ocean where at any given moment there is a lot of plankton. Satellite footage showed ocean waters rich in plankton. In those areas millions of fish congregated in what seemed to be like a feeding frenzy, in which, of course, the smaller fish got eaten by the bigger ones. Food is a natural reinforcer. Availability of food causes the fish migration behavior. The fish came from all  directions and from many different environments. Their “variation in behavior is sufficient to meet demands of new contingencies, the distribution of behavior will tend to shift accordingly.” Palmer did a great job explaining the biological basis of behavior.   

SVB and NVB are atomic repertoires, because “variation is the heart of both evolution by natural selection and shaping by reinforcement and the selection of ultimately blind variation is a nonteleological explanation of adaptive complexity in both biological forms and the behavior of organisms.” Although Palmer doesn’t know about SVB, he emphasizes that “vocal behavior is superior to signing. The emission of normative speech requires precise control and coordination of tongue, lips, throat, jaw, diaphragm, and this is achieved through automatic shaping.” With the arrival of language, human beings became capable of doing many new things. By producing sound, we could inform others about what we can, but what others can’t see. Also, our sound, balance and movements are related. While hearing loss may impair our balance, a hearing aid can have a restoring effect on our ability to hear and maintain our balance. Most importantly, our vocal cords came under environmental control, because vocalizations aide survival; by producing sounds, we communicate our relative sense of safety or threat. 

Scientist “unanimously accept that natural selection and related evolutionary processes are sufficient to explain the countless biological forms observed in nature, because in every case the shaping effect of changing contingencies of selection is possible.” One wonders why they still “reject the analogous claim that adaptive complexity in behavior can be fully explained by the reinforcement of successive approximations of the terminal behavior?” This writer disagrees with Palmer, who still believes that “some reasons for this rejection may be ideological.” As we don’t yet recognize the SVB/NVB distinction, we keep having these so-called ‘raging debates’, which aren’t conversations really, but written versions of particular theoretical points of view.

SVB can only seldom occur, because we don’t know how to maintain the contingencies that make it possible. NVB, on the other hand, can happen all the time, because its contingencies are known to everyone. Related to this is the fact that “novel forms of adaptive behavior often appear in a single trial” and this is also why “gradual shaping of complex behavior [e.g. SVB ] is relatively rare in humans.” No gradual shaping of this complex behavior is needed. When it is produced, it is there, because it can be there. Indeed, entirely different behavioral patterns set the stage for SVB than for NVB. In SVB, no approximations are needed, because we can and do trust each other, but in NVB, we do a lot of unnecessary, extra work, which leads to absolutely nothing, because we can’t trust each other. Thus, only in SVB “shaping is short circuited by guidance from other people or their surrogates” (Andronis, 1991). Our low rates of SVB signify a chaotic, dangerous and primitive world. The relative absence of SVB also involves many mental health problems.

One would expect that “rule-governed behavior of scientists”, especially those involved in verbal behavior, would result in the acknowledgement and the implementation of the lawfulness of SVB, but the “contingency-specifying stimuli” for the SVB/NVB distinction have yet to be made available. It isn’t that scientist can’t produce them, but they will only do this once they stop being preoccupied with and carried away by their written language, which is all they ever talk about. Conversations about this will allow them to pay more attention to how they and we actually talking with others. .

It should be obvious to those seeking to establish a functional account of human interaction, that what we say is a function of how we speak with one another. Indeed “rule-governed behavior illustrates the role of atomic repertoires in human behavior.” However, just as there are “fine-grained units of behavior, each under control of a distinctive stimulus that can be evoked in any permutation by the arrangement of corresponding stimuli” there are also coarse-grained units of behavior too, each under control of and elicited by aversive stimuli, that is, by our voices. NVB always results from fear-inducing environments. It goes without saying that NVB builds on coarse-grained units of behavior. “The induction of a criterion variation in one single trial or a few” is only permitted by SVB, based on operant conditioning, but NVB, has decreased and continues to decrease behavioral variation, because it is based primarily on respondent conditioning. Such is this author’s paraphrasing of Palmer’s words that “natural selection and reinforcement ordinarily exploit blind variation.”

The importance of atomic repertoires is going to depend on the “directed variation” which they permit. As it stands, however, SVB is “ruthlessly winnowed out”, not by “all variations”, but by the increasingly limited amounts of variations “that do not measure up to the [NVB] criterion.” Palmer talks about a natural world which no longer exists, when he states that “selection processes will yield adaptive complexity eventually.” They did, but no longer there is “plenty of time available” to “supply an inexhaustible amount of variants.” He paints a rosy picture by imagining that “fine-grained” “atomic repertoires are the bricks and mortar from which directed variation is build.” In terms of how we talk with each other there is far too little variation to come with novel views.

 

Palmer gives an outdated example of dialing a telephone number, which takes the reader’s attention away from crude evolutionary processes. "The atomic repertoire is a set of elementary responses under verbal control.” Only in passing, he mentions that“the atomic response is the pressing of a key under control of a corresponding verbal antecedent, and the temporal arrangement of verbal stimuli specifies the sequence in which these responses must be emitted.” Behaviorologists know that only operant responses are emitted and that respondent processes are elicited. Palmer doesn’t mention the elicitation of atomic repertoires, but what about the fact that selection processes, which involve elicitation, determine what can and what will be emitted and reinforced? 

Like many others, Palmer is stuck on his phone and  pays lip-service to the fact that “the relevant behavioral atom need not be fine grained if the response is constrained by other variables.” He refers to nonverbal stimuli when he states “the actual atomic repertoire under verbal control is typically quite coarse.” Furthermore, he states that “most of us simply the lack history of differential reinforcement to be able to move our bodies in the required ways in any more than a crude approximation of the specified topography.” This author likes this sentence, because it depicts why we have NVB and not SVB. As Palmer argues, we lack the history of differential reinforcement for SVB. Our attempt at SVB lack the “exquisitely precise topography of response.” When we talk with a baby, however, we naturally adjust with our tone of voice to this small seize human. Likewise, SVB is “multiply determined” in that verbal and nonverbal stimuli emit and maintain it. NVB, by contrast, is mostly elicited. Since topography is given short shrift by behaviorists and by Palmer, “a relatively coarse repertoire of atomic responses is” assumed to be “adequate to generate behavior of requisite precision in many novel contexts.” However, coarse NVB atomic repertoire can’t and doesn’t generate “precision in many novel contexts.”

 

This author used Palmer’s paper to point something out about SVB and NVB. Palmer discusses the grain of the atomic repertoire by comparing those who “have a long history of such differential training, such as gymnasts, artists, military cadets and ballet dancers, with those who lack such histories.” He makes it seem as if there is no difference between a military training drill of soldiers and the coaching of a pianist and he assumes that “coarse grained repertoire is sufficient for many purposes.” This writer totally disagrees with Palmer and thinks that coarse grained repertoire is insufficient for becoming a pianist. However, coarse grained atomic repertoire is definitely adequate for NVB and for killing people. Palmer writes “an atomic repertoire under verbal control is usually acquired through a history of social reinforcement, that is, a history of being told what to do by parents, teachers, siblings and friends.” He acknowledges “the grain of the atomic repertoire depends on the details of these interactions and will be somewhat different from one person to another”, but he makes no distinction between SVB and NVB. 

In coarse-grained NVB, we are told by others what to do. They will only reinforce us if we obey without question and conform to authority and forcefulness. Thus, in NVB, we are punished if we say that we don’t like to be coerced. In SVB, by contrast, we learn in a fine-grained manner, because we are reinforced for what others, who are and who remain attuned with us, are teaching us. Aversive stimulation and punishment are not part of SVB teaching at all. This author would never describe NVB, in which people are screamed at, humiliated, disrespected and mistreated as “a history of social reinforcement.” He would call that anti-social conditioning.

Palmer makes a distinction between “the social contingency of rule following and the non-social contingency of the physical world” and believes “a common topography of response satisfies [these] two contingencies.” This author brings attention to different topographies involved in fine and coarse grained atomic repertoires. In SVB, we sound peaceful, patient and positive, but in NVB, we sound negative, disconnected and mean. Our voice creates and sculpts our environment. 

Palmer states “responses vary from one instance to the next, but nevertheless hang together in orderly response classes.” Here he could have been talking about SVB and NVB, but he isn’t. However, he acknowledges Skinner (1935, 1938), who stated that“the reinforcement of one instance [of SVB or NVB] will affect the strength of all members of the relevant response class.” He gives an example of automatic reinforcement: a child with a xylophone, who imitates a few tones which are played on the piano. Although this child’s attempt is less fine grained than the skilled musician, he or she may be equally automatically reinforced as the pianist. 

SVB “does not appear spontaneously in the observer’s repertoire when it is needed.” Those who grew up in relative safety and happiness know “it has occurred in some form at least once before, that is at the time of observation.” Although SVB has occurred, as long as it was not explicitly reinforced “the behavior will not [and could not] come under control of the relevant stimuli.” People have been told insistently to listen to others, but they were seldom told to listen to themselves. In SVB “successfully replicating the behavior of a model, whether or not it leads to a practical benefit in any given case, is likely to be reinforcing, just as failure to do so is likely to be mildly aversive.” 

Without self-reinforcing effects, SVB is not going to be learned. Reinforcement by others alone didn’t and couldn’t bring SVB about. Since the SVB/NVB distinction is still unknown to most of us, people have only been reinforced for certain aspects of SVB, but nobody, like a competent pianist, was able to become a competent SVB verbalizer. The motivating variables of SVB are relevant: they relate to the lack of social reinforcement. 

“Delayed repetition of a verbal response” is explained because “the response has been emitted before, as a covert echoic response.” This is true for SVB. However, a NVB response is more likely to prevent or disturb the covert echoic response. Consequently, the “intraverbal response” cannot and does not occur. Only during SVB is listening behaving verbally. In NVB listening is primarily behaving non-verbally. The role of Palmer's atomic repertoires needs some adjustment. Certainly, the “differences in the range and grain of these repertoires account for individual differences” but, most importantly, they determine whether we communicate  or not. It is only when atomic repertoires are viewed through the lens of SVB and NVB that we begin to realize the extent to which respondent behaviors have constrained operant behavior. Fine and coarse grained atomic repertoires signify they great difference between SVB and NVB, between conscious and mechanical interaction.