Operant Behavior and the Effects of Centrally Acting Drugs

The study of behavior in operant conditioning laboratories has led to some unusually successful techniques that are now widely exploited in experimental psychopharmacology. Indeed, it can even be argued that the emergence of a truly inter -disciplinary science of psychopharmacology has waited upon the introduction of operant techniques, for operant behavioral pharmacology provides a still rare example of an area of research in which the sophistication of contemporary pharmacological analyses can be matched by sensitivity in behavioral analysis. For too long psychopharmacology has rested on studies of the effects of drugs on patterns of behavior that are arbitrarily engendered and are therefore only poorly understood. The experimental analysis of operant behavior has emphasized the subtlety and power of environmental influences on behavior, and the use of operant techniques in psychopharmacology has in turn emphasized how the effects of drugs on behavior may be subtly but powerfully modulated by these environmental determinants