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Ogden R. Lindsley was born on August 11th, 1922
in Providence, Rhode Island. Ogden grew up in New England.
The War Years
For Lindsley, World War 2 would prove a defining experience
on his way to becoming a scientist, psychologist, and educational leader.
Not long after America became involved in the Second World War, Ogden
joined the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) in 1942. He became a flight
engineer-gunner, rising to Sergeant, on B-24 bombers in the 15th Air Force,
98th Bomb Group. Later in the war, while on one bombing run, to bomb the
axis-controlled oil refineries at Ploesti, Ogden's plane was shot down.
Lindsley recalls hearing his plane's captain shout "bail out!" and these
would be the last words he would hear from that captain, or so he would
know for many years.
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Parachuting down into enemy territory, Ogden was captured
and became a prisoner of war. He spent the final months of the war inside
German POW camps, facing the vicissitudes of a disintegrating nazi empire.
This included forced marches westward through one of Europe's coldest
and worst winters on record, as the Soviet Red Army advanced along the
collapsing Eastern Front. Finally, at one point, late in the war, Ogden
managed to escape. The crucible of World War 2, however, would, on the
one hand give Ogden the skills, knowledge, and outlook of an engineer,
and on the other, provide a high standard for personal courage.
The Free Operant Research Years
Returning to the United States, and following an honorable
discharge from the USAAF, Ogden attended Brown University. There, he received
an A.B. degree, with highest honors, in Psychology in 1948. That same
year he joined the American Psychology Association. Staying on at Brown,
two years later he earned a Sc.M. in Experimental Psychology. In the early
1950's, however, Og would make a decision that would forever change the
path of his career. By an odd confluence of circumstances, he ended up
enrolling at Harvard University in its Ph.D. program in Psychology in
1951. Working as a Teaching Fellow, he helped teach a course titled Natural
Science 114. This was B.F. Skinner's course, the lecture notes from which
later became Skinner's highly influential book Science and Human Behavior,
published in 1953. Skinner became Lindsley's doctoral advisor. Ogden received
his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1957.
As a student of Skinner's, Lindsley encountered the free operant, and
saw the power of free operant conditioning and rate of response. Within
a couple of years Ogden took operant conditioning to the applied world
for the analysis of human behavior. In 1953 Lindsley established the first
human operant laboratory at Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham, Massachusetts.
There, he analyzed experimentally the behaviors of persons diagnosed with
schizophrenia. This research confirmed the power of rate of response as
the most sensitive, and powerful, measure of behavior. Also, during his
tenure at "Met State" Lindsley coined the term "Behavior Therapy," the
first person to do so (as Og notes, this can be verified from an entry
of the same name in the Boston telephone directory of that year).
From 1953 until 1965, Lindsley accepted a series of appointments with
Harvard Medical School. During that time he occupied himself with writing
research grants and contracts to fund the "Behavioral Research Laboratory."
When not seeking funding, he would run experiments on free operant conditioning.
One series of experiments concerned "conjugate schedules of reinforcement."
In these schedules, the intensity of a continuously available reinforcing
stimulus depends on the rate of response. Unlike other schedules that
imposed either a response ratio requirement, or a response interval requirement,
these schedules were "freer" - they depended on the person's rate of response.
Moreover, instead of producing a discrete reinforcer, responding increased
the amplitude of one that was always present. This research held enormous
implications for understanding preference, as well as even finding out
what sorts of stimuli are reinforcing for individuals. Lindsley published
a series of articles on conjugate schedules, dispersing these articles
in what he called "field publications." For instance, one prominent article
appeared in 1962 in the Journal of Advertising Research, with a clear
demonstration of the reinforcing power of both television programs and
the commericals, all behavior captured on cumulative response recorders.
Alas, despite these many "field publications," the field of behavior analysis
has yet to pursue further investigation of conjugate schedules and their
continuous variables.
In 1957 Og helped establish the new Journal of the Experimental Analysis
of Behavior, also known by its initials, JEAB. A founding member of the
new Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, he served on JEAB's
editorial board from 1957 to 1967. Lindsley and other behaviorists developed
this journal precisely because behavioral research, in the tradition established
by Skinner - single subject research designs using cumulative response
recorders and rate of response in study of operant behavior - were not
getting published in mainstream Psychology journals.
In 1964 Lindsley published a paper titled "Direct Measurement and Prosthesis
of Retarded Behavior" in the Journal of Education. According to many,
this paper marked the beginning of what would be called Precision Teaching.
However, in between helping to found JEAB, conducting research on conjugate
schedules and other problems in operant behavior, Lindsley spent much
time writing grants. He came to the conclusion that grant-writing detracted
from his scientific research, and by 1965 decided to change his research
focus from the human operant lab to applied educational research.
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