The Foundation conducts research in its own laboratories located in midtown Manhattan, and through collaborative relationships with university laboratories. The Foundation has an ongoing basic research program in certain areas of behavioral science. Current projects address such issues as the role of reinforcement in behavioral shaping, how certain learning history factors affect resurgence, conditions that produce resurgence or novel behavior, and other basic issues related to learning and performance. Mechner and the Foundation publish their work in appropriate journals and also make some of their publications available as downloads on the present website. Another major project of the Foundation is its endeavor to bring the life's work of the painter Solomon Lerner (1895-1953) to the attention of the art world. This project involves locating and photographing Lerner's paintings, which are scattered throughout the western world including Israel, the United States, Cuba, France, Germany, and Romania, and then publishing reproductions of those paintings along with biographical material about Lerner. Skilled Performance and Resurgence Several of the Foundation's basic research projects are relevant to learning and practicing any type of skilled performance. The phenomenon of resurgence in particular may be basic to an understanding of how performance errors are related to the way a performance was originally learned and practiced. Performance mistakes and undesirable behavior patterns that occur under certain conditions during skilled performance, especially conditions of stress, are often due to resurgence and regression. The significance of this mechanism is explained and developed in the book Learning and Practicing Skilled Performance. It is also the subject of certain experiments, including Number of Prior Repetitions of Operants, and Resurgence. The Revealed Operant The revealed operant is a research preparation that permits certain characteristics of any individual occurrence of an operant to be conveniently recorded and studied. It is defined as a unit of operant behavior that is initiated and terminated by a recorded behavioral event (see the monograph The Revealed Operant: A Way to Study the Characteristics of Individual Occurrences of Operant Responses). Techniques currently used to study revealed operants include lines drawn on a drawing tablet and sequences of keystrokes on a computer keyboard. Reinforcement The Foundation also uses the revealed operant technique in experimental studies on the effects of single reinforcer presentations on a stream of operant behavior. Research questions addressed include the role of an operant's history on the effects of reinforcer presentations, and the subject's history with respect to the reinforcer. Another major area of basic research by the foundation is the role of reinforcement in behavior shaping, the issue being whether reinforcer presentations produce a repetition of the preceding behavior or a perpetuation of its most recent direction of change. The Mechner Notation System The notation system, first published in 1959 (Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2, 133-150), is a language for expressing behavioral contingencies unambiguously and with precision. Its four basic symbols are adequate for diagramming any behavioral contingency -- the interrelationships between behavior and its consequences -- involving one or more individuals. This notation system can be used for specifying all types of behavioral contingencies. It has uses in behavior analysis, the specification of experimental procedures, analysis of social interaction dynamics, micro-economics, and law. The two principal publications that explain the Mechner Notation System are referenced in the Mechner list of publications. The Weingarten and Mechner article, which was published in a book that is now out of print, can be downloaded from this website. Games: The Power Measure of Skill Skill and knowledge, in relation to strategy games and other areas, is normally assessed by means of performance scores and practical results. The limitation of this type of assessment is that it can be confounded by emotional factors, lapses of concentration or attention, and stamina. The purpose of the proposed system, described in the paper The Power of a Player, is to provide a clean "power" measure of knowledge and skill, one that provides a measure of the individual's level of uncertainty, in the information theory meaning of that term, and the speed with which the uncertainty is resolved.