Humans do, indeed, share the same behavioral processes with many
species (as the "detect, react, associate" camp suggests, but
this camp gets too many other things wrong). These processes are:
1.) elicitation of innate behavior by stimuli (this includes
innate tendencies to imitate), 2.) habituation/sensitization
of such elicited responses, 3.) classical (respondent, Pavlovian)
conditioning, and 4.) operant conditioning. Contrary to popular
belief, these processes can be combined and used to theoretically
explain all of the complex behavior that we associate with humans
and kinds of behavior that are not generally regarded as behavior
by mainstream psychology and the fields it has corrupted (i.e.,
perception is behavior, thinking is behavior). Of certain relevance
to this group is the Skinnerian position that consciousness, in the
sense of self-aware, arises when our own behavior comes to serve
a discriminative function. This happens when the verbal community
arranges reinforcement contingencies that produce such discriminative
control. Thinking, then, is largely concerned with the emission of
behavior that is detectable only by the behaving individual, and which
serves a discriminative stimulus controlling other, oftentimes
publicly-observable behavior. This is the sense of "thinking as
problem-solving behavior." So-called "language" (verbal behavior)
is operant behavior that is reinforced through the mediation of (at
first) other people. Once verbal behavior arose, people's behavior
could be made to occur simply by describing actions and consequences.
This is not a separate category since it is simply complex operant
behavior.