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.

Storytelling is a practice that is used to pass down important information about culture, environment, and history. From a behavior analytic perspective, the process of storytelling involves contingencies and can be viewed within the framework of the Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior. For each listener, based on their history of learning and experiences, stories enable a unique type of learning about reinforcers, punishers and cultural context. In African American oral tradition, storytelling was and still is important in preserving the identity, safety, and wellbeing of African Americans. The purpose of this project was to inductively explore story telling between youth and elders in an African American community. A training workshop was developed that included an overview of the importance and role of storytelling in the black community and ways for youth to respectfully listen and learn from elders. The participants included two children and one elder. The independent variable was the training package, the dependent measures included the levels of synchronous engagement, the listener behaviors of the youth and the participant voices, that is, the descriptions and reflections of children and elders about the process and outcomes of this project. A multiple probes design across skills with in-vivo generalization check …

Compared to other examples of human behavior, humor responses have received relatively little attention from the scientific community and by the behavior analytic community in particular. This study investigated what some of the controlling variables for humans to emit a humor response may be. Participants were randomly presented two types of word sequences/jokes: one with a matching punchline and one without a matching punchline. Participants rated whether the jokes were funny or not funny, and reaction time was measured for all stimuli presented. Generally, the results showed that reaction times to punchlines rated as not funny were shorter than punchlines that were rated funny. These differences in reaction time were interpreted with priming, intraverbal control, and multiple control as an experimental foundation. Limitations include the absence of physiological measures due to COVID-19 restrictions and the forced choice of two rating responses. The implications of this research reveal opportunities for future research of humor responses.

Behavior analysts often work with families from diverse cultural backgrounds. Ideally, behavior analysts and families interact in ways that are responsive to the family's culture and valued outcomes. The data indicate that most behavior analysts, however, come from one dominant cultural group. This is a proposal for training program and evaluation method to support culturally responsive professional-family interactions. This proposed study is designed to be conducted via Zoom-- a cloud-based video conferencing service. A pre-post treatment design is proposed to assess the effects of the training. Hypothetical data were generated to consider the range of effects such a program might have on trainee responses to written/live scenarios. Responses in the observation protocol included written descriptions, empathetic statements, perspective taking statements, and non-verbal behaviors. Overall, the program was designed using evidence-based procedures and is likely to support behavior analysts in training and in practice to improve their interactions with families and become more culturally responsive to groups of people that are from the non-dominant culture.

Creativity can be a useful skill in today's classrooms and workplaces. When individuals talk about creativity, it's unclear what the controlling variables are when we tact behavior as "creative." Research in understanding the processes behind behaviors that are considered "creative" would assist in identifying functional relations and provide insight on how to teach creativity. Since creativity is often described as doing something different from the norm, behavioral variability may be a potential aspect of creativity. This study aimed to replicate previous findings by investigating the effects of discrimination training in a multiple schedule of varied and repetitive responding in the context of a video game. Participants played through a 2D online video game made in Bloxels. Different alternating-colored platforms served as the discriminative stimuli for the vary and repeat components. Three parameters of variability were measured (e.g., left jumps, right jumps, and double jumps). The results of the study indicate that participants were able to learn the discrimination of when to repeat and vary their responses depending on which colored platform they encountered.

Approximately 50% of individuals who undergo total knee arthroplasty (TKA) fail to achieve a full functional recovery. Current physical therapy practices commonly utilize neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) to passively activate quadriceps muscles. This passive approach does not directly reteach the lost response, but can strengthen the atrophied muscle. Study 1 compared surface electromyography with biofeedback (sEMGBF) with a changing criterion design to NMES alone. Study 2 compared static sEMGBF to NMES with feedback. Study 3 compared surface electromyography (sEMG) with instructions only to NMES. All other methods were constant across the three studies, where I compared the passive and active approach within-subject, across knees, and across groups while controlling for condition order and leg dominance. Each participant receives both NMES and the shaping procedure. Each condition lasts five minutes and consists of 30 muscle contractions. Each contraction lasts 5 seconds and was followed by a 5 second rest. I compared pre and post adapted maximal voluntary isometric contraction (A-MVIC) tests to determine the effectiveness of each condition. Results of the three studies demonstrated that actively teaching voluntary vastus medialis oblique (VMO) engagement using sEMG is more effective than NMES at increasing maximum voluntary isometric contractions of the VMO.

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 …

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.

Extensive research has been conducted demonstrating the utility of differential reinforcement as an effective intervention for self-injurious behavior. However, the majority of this literature requires teaching an alternative response to access reinforcement. Further evaluation of treating self-injurious behavior in individuals that already possess the repertories to contact reinforcement appropriately. Prior to initiating the study, functional assessments were completed for both participant that demonstrated high-rate bursts of mands served as a reliable precursor to self-injurious behavior. In the present study, we evaluated a waiting period and differential reinforcement of low rate behavior on reducing mands while keeping self-injurious behavior at or near zero levels. Results indicated that shorter waiting periods and DRL values were effective at reducing mands and maintaining near zero levels of self-injurious behavior.

One goal of this study was to evaluate the emergence of mands and intraverbals following tact acquisition for individuals with aphasia due to acquired brain injury. A second goal was to evaluate the transfer of shortened latencies as a function of tact training across untrained operants. In Study 1, the dependent measure was accuracy of responding and in Study 2, the dependent measures were rate and latency of responding. Participants for Study 1 were two uninjured adults (pilot) and two adults with brain injury (ABI). Both sets of participants were directly taught to tact up to 6 stimuli. Once tacts were acquired, the response forms were assessed under mand and intraverbal conditions. All pilot participants and one ABI participant showed mand transfer for all stimuli. Tact to intraverbal transfer varied across participants. One adult with brain injury served as a participant for Study 2. Fluency training was used to teach tacts for 15 stimuli. Response latencies were gathered for all operants before and after training. The participant met the designated aim (rate of responding) and showed a decrease in latencies for tacts and untrained intraverbals. Changes in mand latencies varied. Fluency gains showed partial retention. Results from Study 1 provide …

Previous studies, typically with children, have used delay-tolerance training to treat problem behavior maintained by access to tangibles. This often involves physical prompting and waiting rather than exchanging, two practices that may not be possible or relevant to adults with intellectual disabilities (ID). For many adults with ID in residential settings, exchanging items, rather than waiting per se, may be evocative for problem behavior. In the current study, I evaluated an exchange program to treat problem behavior maintained by access to tangibles for adults diagnosed with ID at a residential facility. I measured the latency to exchange low- and high-preference items following a request for the item and the individual's problem behaviors. Results demonstrated that the exchange program increased relinquishing of an item while decreasing the rate of problem behavior. This analysis provides another method to treat problem behavior maintained by access to tangibles for adults without using physical prompting.

Establishing effective language intervention for those who struggle to acquire it early on has received significant attention from researchers within the field of behavior analysis. The procedures of the present study were adapted from Spurgin' thesis research from 2021, in which a stimulus specific consequence was used during teaching after participants made correct responses. In this case, the stimulus specific consequence was a label for a picture that participants were required to point to during teaching trials. When participants pointed to the correct card, the researcher would label the card and deliver a small wooden block which the participants were told they were working for. In the hear-say procedures, participants were taught one set of cards and instructed to echo the researchers' labels. In the see-say participants were taught a second set of cards and instructed to "beat' the researcher to saying the word. After all cards were taught, were tested with a non-vocal receptive identification test. Immediately following this, participants were tested with a vocal expressive identification test. An extended teaching was included to determine the effects of additional practice within each condition. Results indicated that the participants were able to require some receptive and expressive language but targets …

There are many situations in which human performances appear insensitive to changing contingencies of reinforcement when compared to nonhuman operant performances. Explanations of these discrepancies have appealed to rule-governance and have provided some evidence that instructions produce these differences by restricting response alternatives as well as functioning as discriminative stimuli for other contingencies. In order to further evaluate these potential functions, a canonical study on rule-governance was systematically replicated. Five undergraduate participants were tasked with earning blocks by pressing a button during LED-signaled, fixed-ratio 7 and differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate 5-s schedules of reinforcement. Phase 1 of the experiment switched between these two schedules, with the schedule alternating every 1 minute. Phase 2 added instructions to "Go Fast" and "Go Slow" to the LEDs and programmed the lit LED to switch 30 seconds into each 1-minute session. Phase 3 removed the instructions from the LEDs and returned to the procedures of phase 1, with only one LED lit during each 1-minute session. Results showed that instructions influence the response rates as well as stimulus control over those rates. Results also showed that all participants ignored instructions conflicting with the reinforceable rate by the end of Phase 2. These findings indicate that instances of …

Extensive speech on preferred conversation topics may limit conversations with others. For individuals with ASD, extensive speech on a topic may be a form of restricted or repetitive behavior that may be addressed through skill building. However, previous research suggests that skill building may not be necessary if the behavior is sensitive to differential reinforcement contingencies. To evaluate the effects of differential reinforcement in the form of attention on conversation topics, we replicated the results of Stocco et al. by assessing sensitivity to conversational attention with participant-only topic initiations. Additionally, we extended the procedures by evaluating the effects of topic initiations from the participant and the experimenter (shared initiations). Similar to previous research, our results yielded that speech was sensitive to conversational attention across all participants. That is, differential reinforcement contingencies altered levels of speech on topics of conversation, indicating that differential reinforcement procedures may be sufficient in addressing performance deficits. Lastly, we assessed participant preference for participant-only initiation or shared initiation conversations.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate deficits in social behavior which may hinder them from engaging in social interactions. Results of descriptive analyses suggest that children who engage in prosocial behaviors, such as sharing, likely receive social positive reinforcement from peers in the form of attention. However, functional relations between prosocial behaviors, such as sharing, and their maintaining consequences have yet to be identified. Thus, the purpose of this study was to extend previous research by evaluating the naturally maintaining contingencies associated with sharing in three preschool-aged children with ASD. Functional analyses have traditionally been used to identify the function of maladaptive behavior; however, we extended the same methodological approach to identify functional relations of sharing. Results suggest that sharing was maintained by attention for two participants and was multiply-maintained by both attention and access to tangibles for one participant. These findings indicate that the functional analysis methodology is appropriate to understanding prosocial behaviors. In addition, results advance our understanding of prosocial behavior and may better inform methods of how to functionally teach sharing to individuals with ASD.

Interobserver agreement (IOA) was calculated across three participant dyads for a generalized treatment integrity tool. No dyads achieved 80% agreement during baseline. Task clarification was piloted as an intervention for two of the three dyads. Form agreement produced stabilization in both dyads and improvement in one dyad. Time agreement did not improve but demonstrated marked trends in one dyad.

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.

Wii Fit U games utilize a Wii Balance Board™ (WBB) in a manner that can provide precise feedback contingencies similarly to some forms of balance rehabilitation, thereby potentially increasing the dose of quality therapy with or without the presence of a therapist during post-brain injury rehabilitation. Additionally, an engaging video-game could improve treatment adherence, a critical aspect of making positive functional gains, by potentially increasing the rate and quality of reinforcement embedded in therapy. The present study had three aims: (1) develop a rigorous behavioral therapy for improving balance in individuals living with chronic brain injury using a Wii Fit U game and the WBB; (2) evaluate the program's effects on balance measures using a within-subject experimental design; and (3) assess social validity of behavioral gains by evaluating the program's effects on participant's "subjective balance confidence" (i.e., their Activities-Specific Balance Confidence (ABC) scores). A reversal design is proposed for use with primary study participants, wherein the experimental gameplay condition and no intervention condition are alternated for 6 to 10 weeks. A similar design was used in a truncated fashion with pilot participants, and a multiple baseline design was used with follow-up pilot participants. It was expected that participants would exhibit …

The present study evaluates the effects of incompatible verbal behavior when engaging in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). The WCST is a complex task that requires participants to match stimulus cards based on self-generated rules. After a varying number of trials, the rule changes and the participant will have to self-generate a new rule. Verbal behavior, specifically joint control, is likely involved in rule-following. Seven participants took part in this study. Participants engaged in the WCST either silently or while performing a putatively incompatible behavior, counting backward from 100 to 0. Results suggest joint control might be involved as when participants engaged in the incompatible behavior their performance was affected in terms of lower accuracy and longer reaction times compared to the silent baseline.

In the experimental analysis of behavior, response allocation is typically studied under concurrent interval schedules, with two response alternatives, in a static environment. The natural environment of the unfettered organism, however, is dynamic insofar as even frequently visited environments are rarely identical from encounter to encounter. Additionally, natural environments usually offer more than two concurrently available behaviors that are often scheduled for reinforcement contingent on rate of responding. The purpose of this study was to determine how the addition or removal of a third response alternative affected response allocation between two topographically dissimilar operants on independent concurrent ratio schedules in a dynamic environment. Results indicate that the addition of the third operant served to temporarily suppress response rates of the first two operants but had no or only minor and inconsistent effects on relative allocation. The reintroduction of the third operant in a new location again suppressed response rates in three of four subjects and slightly shifted response allocation for one subject. Highly individual anecdotal patterns could be seen in tangential observations of each of 4 subjects. The results suggest the possibility that new alternatives have temporary effects on response bias, and that these effects may be variable and dependent …

When autism interventionists within behavioral intervention programs continually assess the child's behavior and context and adjust their teaching behaviors accordingly, the child can quickly progress towards their goals. While evaluations of flexible behavior-change techniques implemented by experienced clinicians are present in the literature, systematic evaluations of staff training procedures to train interventionists in responsive decision making are lacking. In the current study, flexible training procedures were utilized to not only teach direct-line staff to make decisions based on the learner's behavior, but also to understand and articulate the variables they were responding to. During in vivo training sessions, trainers tailored their use of instructions, modeling, practice, feedback, narration modeling and shaping, and decision-making guidance to the dynamic needs of the staff and child. The effects of the treatment package, which consisted of an in-service training and in vivo training sessions, were measured by observing staff teach vocal manding, which was chosen based on the importance of the skill for the child and because it afforded many opportunities for the staff to learn to make decisions about how to occasion and shape responses. The three children with autism who participated in the study made progress in terms of increasing their frequency …

Functional analyses are the gold standard of confirming maintaining variables of problem behavior. Despite widespread support, many clinical settings instead use anecdotal assessments. These have been shown to have poor reliability when used by non-experts but can be useful for confirming maintaining variables of problem behavior when agreement has reached a certain level. We used behavior skills training to teach new staff member pairs behavior function to increase their reliability on these assessments. We found that although agreement increased slightly, this was not clinically significant. Out of the two pairs of participants one pair of participants was able to identify their client's maintaining variable of problem behavior. Future research should investigate the type of training used for non-experts for example training non-experts to state problem behavior in objective operational terms.

Recombinative generalization is a generative outcome that involves responding to novel stimulus combinations, and it can be facilitated through an instructional approach called matrix training. A learner's history with constituent stimuli and the arrangement of combination stimuli within the instructional matrix may affect the likelihood of recombinative generalization. To investigate this further, the current project assessed recombinative generalization with novel combinations of abstract stimuli by programming specific training histories for undergraduate student participants. The matrix training conditions were: (a) trained constituents with overlap training, (b) untrained constituents with overlap training, (c) trained constituents with nonoverlap training, and (d) untrained constituents with nonoverlap training. We evaluated whether and the extent to which recombinative generalization occurred in each matrix training condition in comparison to a condition that included training the constituents and providing a word-order rule. Finally, we compared the training trials in experimental conditions to directly training all constituents and combinations. The results suggested both overlap conditions and the trained constituents with nonoverlap condition produced recombinative generalization, and the trained constituents with nonoverlap condition was the most efficient. These results could inform the training order and stimulus arrangements practitioners employ to program for recombinative generalization.

This study explored the effects of cultural consequences identified through a ranking task on the selection of interlocking behavioral contingencies and aggregate products constituting ethically self-controlled responses when participants had pre-existing relationships. Two experiments were conducted to explore these effects. Experiment 1 had two triads of three participants each recruited from a university-based autism center. Experiment 2 had three triads of three participants each; participants in Triads 3 and 4 were recruited from a university-based rock-climbing club while participants in Triad 5 were recruited from the same university-based autism center as in Experiment 1. All participants were exposed to a task that involved choosing odd or even rows from a matrix displayed throughout the experimental session. Individual contingencies were programmed in all conditions while metacontingencies were programmed in some conditions. Participants selected the topography of the cultural consequence through a pre-experimental ranking task prior to the onset of the experimental session. A change was made to the experimenter's verbal behavior in all operant and metacontingency conditions for Experiment 2. The results of both experiments indicate that identification of the cultural consequence through a ranking task with participants having pre-existing relationships did have an effect on the continued selection of the …