Hmmm, perhaps years ago when the book was written, Skinner may have been misunderstood but in today's world he is widely regarded (relatively speaking) as bringing the practice of operant conditioning to the mainstream practice of working with animals and people with extreme learning disabilities.
You can thank two of his phd students for that. Keller and Marion Breland left their studies to open ABE which trained thousands of animals for all sorts of work. If you ever saw a dancing chicken at a fair or a pig in a Purina commercial, it was likely trained at ABE. Bob Bailey was an employee of theirs and later married Marion after Keller passed. Bob Bailey still speaks publicly on occasion and is well worth seeing if you get the opportunity. He worked for the military prior to joining ABE and worked marine mammals, birds etc... prior to the development of guided misses they trained pigeons to peck at a screen to keep missles on course, Ravens to fly into buildings to steal top secret papers, dolphins to place electronic jamming devices on enemy ships and much more. Marion eventually returned to her studies and went on to apply their training principles to children with autism as well as other disorders. Until I just read that Skinner was misunderstood, it never crossed my mind, then again, I've read some of his work but never encountered much in the way of hearsay. No matter how cognizant you are of the tenets of operant conditioning, Pavlov is always on your shoulder. Ray Vallejo CA -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
