title: About Skinner and time: behavior-analytic contributions to research on animal timing.
abstract: The article discusses two important influences of B. F. Skinner, and later workers in the behavior-analytic tradition, on the study of animal timing. The first influence is methodological, and is traced from the invention of schedules imposing temporal constraints or periodicities on animals in The Behavior of Organisms, through the rate differentiation procedures of Schedules of Reinforcement, to modern temporal psychophysics in animals. The second influence has been the development of accounts of animal timing that have tried to avoid reference to internal processes of a cognitive sort, in particular internal clock mechanisms. Skinner's early discussion of temporal control is first reviewed, and then three recent theories-Killeen & Fetterman's (1988) Behavioral Theory of Timing; Machado's (1997) Learning to Time; and Dragoi, Staddon, Palmer, & Buhusi's (2003) Adaptive Timer Model-are discussed and evaluated.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Psychology, University of Liege, Belgium. helga.lejeune@ulg.ac.be
authors.forename: Helga
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Lejeune
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Richelle
authors.forename: J H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Wearden
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010507:Periodicity; D011582:Psychological Theory; D011601:Psychophysics; D012055:Reinforcement Schedule; D012106:Research; D013998:Time Perception