Commentary to A. C. Catania: Discussion: The Flight from Experimental Analysis

The main theme of Catania’s discussion points at a conference on Quantitative Behavior Analysis in Manchester, England, in 1980 was that mathematical analysis has supplanted rather than supplemented experimental analysis of behavioral data. Catania provided several examples from the published literature of misleading attempts to fit data to equations. In the 30+ years that have passed since that conference, the uses of mathematical analyses have in fact increased in the experimental literature and spread into the area of applied behavior analysis as evidenced by the appearance in recent years of mathematical curve-fitting practices in some publications in Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. The recently published ABA Handbook of Behavior Analysis(Madden, Dube, Hackenberg, Hanley, & Lattal, 2013) similarly has several chapters in both basic and applied areas that feature mathematical modeling