SOME EFFECTS OF DRUGS ON VISUAL DISCRIMINATION IN THE PIGEON

Joseph V. Brady, elsewhere in these pages, has mentioned some of the operant conditioning techniques that are being developed to assess the behavioral effects of drugs. In this paper I shall describe some preliminary results obtained with still another method of this sort. Both psychotic behavior and drug-induced behavior are often characterized by a lack of appropriateness to environmental stimuli. To put it in another way, stimuli appear to have less control over behavior than usual. The present method is specifically concerned with the stimulus control of behavior and druginduced changes in this control. The procedure derives from B. F. Skinner’s operant-conditioning methodology. It is rather complex and will be analyzed in detail in a future paper. ’