Children acquire many skills through play. These range from fine and gross motor skills, social skills, problem-solving, to even creativity. Creativity or creative engagement is frequently a component in early preschool curricula. A pivotal repertoire to engage in behaviors deemed creative, such as art, storytelling, problem-solving, and the like, is the ability to vary one's responses regardless of the specific repertoire. Researchers have developed methods to produce response variability. However, notwithstanding the significant contributions from the literature for prompting response variability, it remains unclear how much variation in responding is socially appropriate. To fill this research gap, the purpose of this study is to characterize and understand the different ways preschool children commonly interact with the activities and materials present in a preschool classroom. In our study, we assessed children's repeat item interactions, novel item interactions, and time allocation across seven concurrently available activity centers. A multifarious pattern for item interactions emerged across children. Some children had restricted levels of novel item and center interactions, while other children had more varied novel item and center interactions. However, the variance in interactions was predominantly controlled by the center type. This study bolsters our understanding of variability and creativity within a school …

Social issues are becoming increasingly apparent. More people are experiencing the impact of social issues directly and through their media consumption. It is important to understand and reflect on our collective impact on the media and how the media affects the collective. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effects of a collaborative workshop (collective shaping) and a verbal community that examined media depictions of social justice and injustice related to context and power dynamics. The effects of the workshop were evaluated using an A-B design with multiple probe measures across three participants. During the pre-, probe, and post-training assessments, participants watched videos and responded to a written prompt. Results of the study suggest that written responses were not adequately trained during the workshop. However, anecdotally, participant's verbal responding shifted drastically during the training workshop. The results are discussed within the context of the training apparatus, effects the workshop had on the participants and researchers, and progression forward.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects that a training workshop and collective shaping had on the reflective statements and feeling and emotion labels in a written response to videos relating to social issues. The workshop included a presentation interspersed with videos to help practice dialoguing and guide discussion toward generating discourse for social change. The effects of the workshop were evaluated using a single subject A – B design with multiple probe measures across three participants. Participants were given a prompt to write a descriptive narrative in response to a video clip, creating a permanent product for quantitative and qualitative analyses. The study resulted in slight increasing trends for both reflective statements and feeling and emotion labels for Participants 1 and 2. Further analyses show that Participant 3, despite showing little change across reflective statements and feeling and emotion labels, showed significant increase and more stability in the percentage of total words within reflective statements. The results of the workshop are discussed in the context of future research, including the role of social issues in our everyday language and how that affects us at a personal level.

Prejudice establishes coercive contingencies that restrict human rights and diminish quality of life. Social media has made the oppression experienced by individuals more apparent. Perspective taking and empathy can change prejudicial behavior by fostering relationships and encouraging self-identification with those who are different from ourselves. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effects of a guided collective shaping program on the occurrence of perspective taking and empathetic responses when viewing social justice media. The effects of the workshop were evaluated using a multiple baseline design across workshop topics. Written responses to video clips were analyzed before, during, and after training. The results of the study were inconclusive. The results of the training, based on the responses measured, indicate an increase in one measure of perspective taking and no changes in the other measures. At the same time, anecdotal observations indicated a change in the way participants talked about the issues over the course of the training. The results are discussed within the context of response form measurement, the COVID-19 pandemic, and potential research directions.

Researchers investigated how the contingent delivery of a cultural consequence on target culturants in an asymmetric iterated prisoner's dilemma game (IPDG) affected players' choices. The asymmetric IPDG creates an analogue to income disparities created by wage gaps and other cultural practices that create wealth inequalities between different members of the population and allows researchers to explore how these inequalities affect cooperation between players. Six undergraduate students divided into three dyads participated in an ABABCDCD reversal design. An asymmetric IPDG was arranged in Condition A and C such that one player received a greater number of points regardless of the second participants' selections - analogue to contingencies that produce income inequalities from wage gaps. In Condition B and D, a metacontingency was arranged such that delivery of a cultural consequence (CC; bonus points equally distributed among the dyad) was contingent on the oscillating production of target aggregate products (AP) across two consecutive cycles. When participants' coordinated responding and contacted the target AP→ CC relation, the wage gap was reduced. However, individual contingencies are in direct competition for the "wealthier" player, reducing the probability of cooperative responding. Results showed the CC selected certain oscillations between target APs resulting in a decrease of …

Current food production methods in the United States contribute to environmental degradation as well as food insecurity. Food production by means of community gardens has the potential to reduce the deleterious effects of current production methods. However, many community gardens face challenges that hinder their longevity, thereby reducing the likelihood of the support they might provide for environmentally sustainable food production and decreased food insecurity for community members. A behavioral systems science approach was combined with ethnographic research methods, matrix analysis, and a literature review regarding best practices for community gardens to study the cultural practices of three established community gardens in the southwest region of the US. The results of the analyses conducted are presented in terms of recommendations to support each target community garden's sustainability. Recommendations regarding future research include environmental manipulations to identify functional relations and potential outcome measures for improving the longevity of community gardens are provided.

The exponential growth of the human population has contributed to the overuse and degradation of common pool resources. Using science as a tool for informed policy-making can improve the management of our common pool resources. Understanding the conditions that influence groups of individuals to make ethical self-controlled choices may help solve problems related to the overuse and degradation of common pool resources. Ethical self-control involves the conflict of choice between one that will benefit the individual versus one that will benefit the group. The cumulative effect of many individuals behaving in an ethically self-controlled manner with common resource use may offset some of the harm posed by overuse of common pool resources. Metacontingency arrangements involving ethical self-control may provide some insight as to if and how groups may cooperate to manage a common pool resource. This manuscript proposes an experimental preparation and methodology to evaluate the effects of competing magnitudes of cultural consequences on culturants and their cumulative effect on common pool resources; and provides an analysis and discussion of five trends that might result from such a line of research.

The goal of this study was to use a nonlinear approach to create a program to teach positive and negative reinforcement and punishment. A specific interest was to determine whether the program and its testing allowed for specific recommendations for future iterations of the program. The tests and program developed for this study were completed by 18 participants. Pre-test and post-test data showed that participants learned the most about positive contingencies, nonexample items, and ambiguous contingencies. Participants learned the least about negative contingencies. The data also revealed where additions to the instructional program were needed to produce better outcomes in future versions of the program.

Sometimes, changes in consequences are accompanied by a clear stimulus change explicitly arranged by the experimenter. Other times when new consequences are in effect, there is little or no accompanying stimulus change explicitly arranged by the experimenter. These differences can be seen in the laboratory as multiple (signaled) schedules and mixed (unsignaled) schedules. The current study used college students and a single-subject design to examine the effects of introducing signaled and unsignaled schedules, and the transitions between them. In one phase, a card was flipped from purple to white every time the schedule was switched from VR-3 to FT-10. In another phase, the schedule still changed periodically, but the card always remained on the purple side. Results showed that the participants' responding was controlled by the schedule of reinforcement, by the color of the card, or both. These results suggest that changes in patterns of reinforcement lead to changes in stimulus control. In addition, the stimulus control for a behavior can come from several different sources. During teaching, it may facilitate the development of stimulus control to change the environment when a new behavior is required.

The term "resurgence" generally refers to the reappearance of certain behaviors during extinction. Different definitions describe these behaviors as previously reinforced, previously extinguished, or simply previously learned. At first glance, these definitions seem the same. And, researchers have not given much thought to the differences between them. However, these definitions could refer to different initial teaching procedures, and these differences may produce different results during extinction. The present study used the Portable Operant Research and Teaching Lab (PORTL) to examine how differences in the initial teaching procedure affected the behavior of college students during extinction. In the first condition, participants learned four behaviors. Each behavior was extinguished before the next behavior was taught. When all four behaviors were put on extinction, they resurged in the reverse order from how they were taught. A second condition followed the same procedure as the first with one difference. Each behavior was not extinguished before the next behavior was taught. When these four behaviors were put on extinction, they resurged in the order they were learned. These results indicate that the initial training procedure can influence the order in which behaviors appear during extinction.