Timberlake's theories dissolve anomalies

Two of Timberlake's major contributions, amongst numerous other good notes, are Behavior Regulation Theory (BRT), and Behavior Systems Theory (BST). BRT was a refinement of the Premack Principle. What both got right was that reinforcers are responses, not stimuli. For BRT, they were responses that were occurring below the rate at which they otherwise would given free access to them. BST was a larger ethological framework for our science of behavior. We have always needed it, as it opens an important window on our field. With that window closed, it is easy to stumble over a half-dozen anomalies in the dark, ones that we say humph to, scratch our heads, and then move on. When illuminated by BST, however, such anomalies become keys to a deeper understanding of our subject. This paper reviews numerous anomalies that make sense within the joint framework of BST and BRT, and Dickinson's Dual-Process theory of learned behavior. No longer anomalous in that context, all that is now left to do is test the validity and productivity of this general framework for those many strange cases.