Dr. Anna Petursdottir: In Your Mind’s Eye: Imagery as a Variable in Behavior Analysis

Abstract

In Science and Human Behavior, Skinner (1953) addressed imagery, such as seeing in the absence of the thing seen, as conditioned and operant perceptual responses, the products of which may serve as sources of discriminative control for other behavior. In this talk, I will review some proposed roles of conditioned and operant perceptual responses in problem-solving, remembering, and derived relational responding, discuss problems with empirical investigation, and review findings from basic and applied research studies on the effects of manipulations intended to influence imagery. These include recent findings demonstrating how emergent conditional discriminations are influenced by instructions to engage in task-relevant or task-irrelevant visualization during baseline training in a derived relational task.