The eternal antithesis: a commentary on donahoe, palmer, and burgos.

Some years ago I built a large demonstration pigeon chamber that was constructed of transparent Plexiglas on three vertical sides and the top. The intelligence panel and the bottom were opaque. The chamber was placed in a small room in the laboratory, and a pigeon was trained to peck a transilluminated key in the usual manner with presentations of a few seconds access to grain. Key pecking was quickly established, and the schedule of reinforcement was changed gradually from fixed-ratio (FR) 1 to FR 50. Halfhour sessions were conducted daily for a week or so, at which time responding seemed stable. For reasons I no longer recall, I decided that the chamber was not in the most appropriate orientation, so one day I simply rotated it 180 degrees. I then placed the pigeon as usual in the chamber, closed the door to the room, and started the program. When I returned a while later, I noticed that no responses had occurred. Upon opening the door, the reason was obvious: The pigeon stood in its usual location facing directly away from the key panel! A bit of further training was necessary to reestablish key pecking on the opposite wall. As Donahoe, Palmer, and Burgos emphasize, ‘‘context sets the occasion for responding, although its influence may not be apparent until the context is changed’’ (p. 196). More generally, Donahoe and Palmer (1994) asserted, ‘‘what is selected is always an environment–behavior relation, never a response alone’’ (p. 68). This is the major theme of Donahoe et al., and I find its exposition extraordinarily liberating. The perspective is a kind of ‘‘unified field theory’’ in that, finally,