I will do a quick overview of this. 
I won't bore you with this history - but I think
you should have some idea of the history of
behavior analysis. Skinner wrote a book in 1938 called
the Behavior of Organisms - that began our field of 
behavior analysis. BF Skinner as you know was at Harvard University
for most of his career, he studied there as well.
He is a world famous psychologist. My guess is - how many
people have heard of the name BF Skinner? I would imagine
most people have. He was claimed to be the most influential
psychologist of the 20th century - voted by the American
Psychological Association. And he contributed mainly to our
understanding of behavior; and he uncovered the natural laws.
In the same way that Newtown uncovered some of the early
natural laws related to matter (if you will), and physics, Skinner
uncovered the natural laws of behavior. And he basically said
there a few natural laws: reinforcement - when good things happen
after behavior they keep happening; extinction - when good things
have happened after behavior but they stop happening, that 
behavior stops occuring. These are the natural laws. These are not
Skinner's theory, these are laws that nature decided, however you
want to think about nature. Nature made this decision. In the same
way that nature made the decision about everything. And however
you want to think about nature - an evolutionary process, a religious
process, or some combination of both. Nature made these decisions
if you will. There are natural laws, sort of like gravity, it is a natural law.
There is no way you can avoid gravity, no matter how much you try to
wish it away, or don't want it to exist, it exists. In the same way that
reinforcement exists - when good things happen after behavior they
keep happening. When good things used to happen after behavior
but they stop happening, that behavior stops occuring [extinction].
There are activities that make things reinforcing, for example, if
you are deprived of food, you are now motivated for food. So there
are things you can do to make somebody want something or not want
something - motivation. Now punishment - he (Skinner) did not recommend
punishment, he just suggested that punishment was part of life.
You put your hand on a hot stove. He would call 
that burning sensation
you get that makes you pull it away a form of punishment. 
He was not advocating that we should use punishment.
He was just saying when bad things happen after behavior, which they do
in everyday life, you make a mistake and your run into somebody's car,
hopefully that behavior is punished in the sense that you won't do it again. 
When bad things happen, you don't do those things again. And he said
that is a natural law as well - never advocated, in fact advocated strongly
against the use of punishment throughout his entire career.
Stimulus control: things that happen in the environment control our
behavior if they are correlated with reinforcement. In other words,
somebody with a developmental disability who doesn't learn from
watching others may learn that this stimulus - a fork - is used to spear
this food, and because I get reinforced for doing so. This stimulus then
begins to control the behavior. It is called stimulus control - more on that later.
These are the principles that he introduced. One of his colleagues, Fred Keller
wrote a book - Principles of Psychology - well known, and then Skinner wrote
many books: Science and Human Behavior, and then he wrote the book
Verbal Behavior - which is an account of language development in human
beings, how language develops, he said these principles here guide language
as well. There is a Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,
one of the people who criticize Skinner the most was a fellow by the name of 
Noam Chomsky, MIT, in Boston, Cambridge, not too far from Skinner,
although they never talked, although they were practically neighbours. 
And he wrote a very scathing review of that book. The first behavior
analytic paper was published in 1959, ABA paper - applied behavior
analytic paper, was only published in 1959, by Jack Michael and Ted Ayllon,
they basically taught a nurse in a psychiatric ward to overcome some of the
psychotic behavior of the individuals. Psychiatrists were thinking these people
needed medication, they needed to be restrained, they needed psychological
therapy to overcome some of their psychotic sort of behavior and what
Michael and Allyon found was that a lot of this behavior of people with
psychosis is reinforced - and the reason why it is ocurring is people paying
attention to it, giving them things when they talk in strange sort of ways,
and they were able to show that psychotic behavior - at least partially -
is under the control of reinforcement, provided by the nurses. It is the first
ABA paper published in the field of behavior analysis.
Lovaas began working with children with autism in the 1960s, I am sure
you are somewhat familiar with Ivar Lovaas, he worked with children with
autism at UCLA - I think he was there since the earth cooled, actually - to
give you some idea of how long he was there. He published a lot of
research on children with autism using ABA principles and we make use
of some of that research today. The Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis
began in 1968 - that is our premier journal. Jack Michael, who is a 
name well known in the field of ABA was influenced by Skinner and he
began teaching using Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior. I learnt
most of what I know from Jack and the person who trained me,
Scott Wood, who was a student of Jack. Mark Sundberg, whose name
you probably know - the developer of the VB-MAPP - Mark began working
working with Jack and developed a journal called the Analysis of Verbal
Behavior, which is our current journal in this field. Board certification began
and a couple of books were published on language.
A lot has happened in the last 20 years, but this gives you a quick run down
of where we are at. Since 1998 what has happened is that dozens and
dozens of papers have been published, not only on ABA, but the 
application of ABA principles - which are these principles right here -
to the development of language, and there is now a field that we call 
the Analysis of Verbal Behavior - which we are going to talk quite a bit
about, and which makes use of methods that are based upon these 
principles and Skinner's 1957 book on Verbal Behavior, that we will
make use of in order to teach children with autism, and there have 
been dozens and dozens of studies published on that since that time.
