Skinner is, without a doubt, one of the most predominant figures in the development of Behavior Modification and Behavior Therapy. Skinners' work is essential to the development of Behavior Modification and Behavior Therapy. Beginning with the social need for efficient psychotherapy, and after having generated a solid theoretical body of behavioral laws, Skinner indicated and also developed the appropriate path towards efficient interventions for unadaptive behavior. He developed a new theory regarding abnormal behavior (psychopathology), as well as a procedural model for evaluation (diagnosis) and intervention: “The functional analysis of behavior”. His applications for this kind of work are pioneering and at the same time, he is the agglutinant figure of what we today call “Behavior Modification and/or Therapy”.

It is remarkable that a scientist could change the theories and practices of a discipline as radically as Skinner and his work did. His work, however, still has its limitations. The best way to acknowledge and pay tribute to Skinners' work is to overcome these limitations.

The sway that the response-reinforcement framework (Spencer, Thorndike, Hull, Skinner) has held on the behavioral sciences for nearly a hundred years is finally ending. The strength of this framework lay in providing concepts and methods for studying the effects of hedonic (reinforcing) stimuli on the repetition of specified responses acquired in instrumental training situations of various kinds. Its weakness lay in the invalidity of its central assumptions, stimulus-response association and response-reinforcement, which could not deal with motor-equivalence and flexibility (or “intelligence”) in behavior. To the four decades of incisive criticism on particular theoretical and empirical grounds, a more comprehensive challenge to the response-reinforcement framework is now added by the newer ideas about the nature of cognitive, motivational, and response-production processes that have emerged from the work of ethologists, neuroscientists, and cognitive psychologists. An alternative framework, incorporating the newer ideas, is clearly needed.

The particular framework proposed here is based on the ideas of perceptual learning of stimulus-stimulus correlations and of a motivational (rather than reinforcing) role of hedonic (incentive) stimuli. According to it, an act is produced when its act-assembly is activated by a pexgo (perceptual representation) of a certain eliciting stimulus complex (ES). When certain eliciting stimuli are correlated with incentive stimuli, they acquire motivational properties that serve to strengthen the pexgos generated by those eliciting stimuli and thereby increase the probability of activation of the corresponding act-assemblies. Motivation thus influences response production, not by directly instigating “existing” responses, but by modulating the strength of pexgos of eliciting stimuli for the succession of acts that comprise a response. Therefore, a response is always constructed afresh on the basis of current perceptions; not even a stable and stereotyped response occurs as a mere activation of a preformed motor program. The topography of any response that emerges is determined by the nature of the motivational state and the momentary spatiotemporal distribution of eliciting stimuli of changing motivational valence.

By suggesting that the animal learns the overlapping and nested correlations between the stimulus events that commonly occur in a given situation, and by separating what is learned from the processes of response production, the proposed perceptual-motivational framework seems capable of dealing with the problems of motor equivalence and flexibility in adaptive behavior. Some implications of this approach for further behavioral and brain research on such problems as behavior modification, learning by observation of models, analysis of causality, and search for neural substrates of learning and response production, are outlined.

In a previous paper we presented a neural network called FRONTAL that attempted to capture the ability of infants to actively self-organize in a non-stationary environment. This paper describes the procedure whereby FRONTAL is interfaced to a robotic system called DART. DART comprises of a PUMA-562 arm and a real-time image processing system. The implementation procedure consisted of first connecting FRONTAL to a simulated DART robot. After successful operation, FRONTAL was connected to the real hardware DART. The ability of this robotic system to actively explore its surroundings and modify its behavior based on experience and environmental feedback confirms previous simulation results.

Motivation is the art of getting people to do things or to do things more efficiently or quickly. Motivation of personnel involved in relief activities differs substantially from similar activities in the business sector as such persons may be: 1) part-time staff without a long-term commitment; 2) volunteers; 3) part of the affected population;Finnish National Training and/or 4) assigned from other organizations. Motivation entails goal-directed behaviors directed at satisfaction of individual needs.

This lesson addresses the hierarchical pyramid of motivation including: 1) physiological; 2) safety; 3) social; 4) esteem; and 5) self-actualization and how an individual's personality affects their level of motivation. In addition, personal goals play an important role in determining a persons behavior. Management programs that can be used to increase motivation are discussed including the use of re-wards for good performance. Lastly, methods for behavior modification are included.