Preface: SQAB 2013: Contextual Control

Abstract

This Special Issue is titled 'Contextual Control'. The 36th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Quantitative Analysis of Behavior (SQAB) took place at the Hilton Minneapolis (Minneapolis, MN, USA), May 23-25, 2013. The presentations from that conference are reported in this special issue as reviews or reports of original research. This issue brings together research from a variety of research traditions that examine the role of context on; conditioning, learning, choice, gambling, generalization, visual and auditory perception, choice, timing, and delay discounting and delay discounting. The number of different species reported on reinforces the importance of general explanations in the analysis of behaviour. Our world is filled with examples of stimuli that signal what, when and where we might do things. Some effects are subtle, others have more impact - such as one might experience if one treats a red traffic light like a green one! Any examination of learning and conditioning will be incomplete if it fails to acknowledge the role of context.