Distinguished Service to Behavior Analysis Awardee
2010: Dr. A. Charles Catania
A. Charles Catania is Professor Emeritus at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he co-founded its Master's track in applied behavior analysis. He is Past-President of ABAI and of Division 25 of the American Psychological Association and has served as Editor of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. He had the great good fortune to start his career in the fall of 1954 in Fred Keller's introductory psychology course, which included a weekly rat lab, and later to serve as Teacher's Assistant in Nat Schoenfeld's Experimental Psychology sequence. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, where he then conducted postdoctoral research in Skinner's pigeon laboratory. Catania continued working with rats and pigeons and other organisms over subsequent decades, during which he became increasingly impressed by striking parallels between biological accounts of evolution in terms of Darwinian natural selection and behavior analytic accounts of operant behavior in terms of the selection of behavior by its consequences. He sees the methods and concepts of the biological sciences as having much to offer to our field and has argued that the science of behavior might best be regarded as a component of the biological sciences.
The lesson that the study of nonhuman behavior is essential to our understanding of verbal behavior also came from Columbia, where in spring 1957 Catania took a seminar on verbal behavior jointly taught by Fred Keller, Nat Schoenfeld, and Ralph Hefferline. The course began by covering Skinner's William James lectures and then, when Skinner's Verbal Behavior was published midway into the semester, by comparing the older and newer versions. Though virtually all of Catania's early experimental work was devoted to nonhuman learning, the concentration on behavior without words was critical; a pigeon's behavior is hard to understand precisely because it doesn't involve words. Behavior without words reveals what is special about human verbal behavior, which is necessarily built upon a nonverbal foundation. Catania's earlier work on learning without words was highly appropriate preparation for teaching courses on verbal behavior, because it made some special features of verbal behavior stand out clearly. One function of his textbook, Learning, is to integrate the topics of nonverbal and verbal behavior, which have too often been given separate treatments.
Back to Distinguished Service to Behavior Analysis Award