Rosales-Ruiz J, Baer D M
Department of Behavior Analysis, University of North Texas, Denton 76203, USA.
J Appl Behav Anal. 1997 Fall;30(3):533-44. doi: 10.1901/jaba.1997.30-533.
Most concepts of development explain certain behavior changes as products or markers of the invariable succession of emerging periods, stages, refinements, or achievements that define and order much of an individual's life. A different but comparable concept can be derived from the most basic mechanisms of behavior analysis, which are its environmental contingencies, and from its most basic strategy, which is to study behavior as its subject matter. From a behavior-analytic perspective, the most fundamental developmental questions are (a) whether these contingencies vary in any systematic way across the life span, and thus make behavior change in a correspondingly systematic way; (b) whether some of these contingencies and their changes have more far-reaching consequences than others, in terms of the importance to the organism and others, of the behavior classes they change. Certain behavior changes open the door to especially broad or especially important further behavior change, leading to the concept of the behavioral cusp. A behavioral cusp, then, is any behavior change that brings the organism's behavior into contact with new contingencies that have even more far-reaching consequences. Of all the environmental contingencies that change or maintain behavior, those that accomplish cusps are developmental. Behavior change remains the fundamental phenomenon of development for a behavior-analytic view; a cusp is a special instance of behavior change, a change crucial to what can come next.
大多数发展概念将某些行为变化解释为新兴时期、阶段、细化或成就的不变序列的产物或标志，这些序列定义并安排了一个人生活的大部分内容。一个不同但类似的概念可以从行为分析的最基本机制及其最基本策略中推导出来，行为分析的最基本机制是其环境偶发事件，最基本策略是以行为作为研究对象。从行为分析的角度来看，最基本的发展问题是：（a）这些偶发事件在整个生命周期中是否以任何系统的方式变化，从而使行为相应地以系统的方式发生变化；（b）就它们所改变的行为类别对生物体和其他方面的重要性而言，这些偶发事件及其变化中的一些是否比其他事件具有更深远的影响。某些行为变化为特别广泛或特别重要的进一步行为变化打开了大门，从而引出了行为临界点的概念。那么，行为临界点是指任何使生物体的行为接触到具有更深远影响的新偶发事件的行为变化。在所有改变或维持行为的环境偶发事件中，那些促成临界点的偶发事件具有发展性。对于行为分析观点来说，行为变化仍然是发展的基本现象；临界点是行为变化的一个特殊实例，是对接下来可能发生的事情至关重要的一种变化。
