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.

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.

In an organism's natural environment, there are always an uncountable number of stimuli, and stimulus features, available to gain control over behavior. When these component stimuli are presented simultaneously, this new stimulus compound can occasion a previously unseen effect on behavior. Stimulus compounding is a method used to better understand how variables in stimulus features may impact the final effect on an organism's responding when presented with a stimulus compound. While stimulus compounding experiments are often conducted using intermodal tone and light stimuli, it is conducted far less often using intramodal stimuli, potentially due to the competing stimulus features of same-modality stimuli. Even less conducted research has been done using two odor component stimuli, despite the large impact odor has on many species' behavior. The purpose of this study was to conduct a stimulus compounding experiment using intramodal ambient odor stimuli in rats, to see what kind of effect a mixed odor compound would have on the subject's behavior. This was done using a wind tunnel designed operant chamber, where both subjects were trained to respond to independently presented odor stimuli. Following training a compound mixture of both component odors was presented to the subjects. The results of this study …

When learning conditional discriminations, it is possible that faulty sources of control develop and interfere with acquisition. In 2021, Bergmann et al. reported the effects of different integrity levels (i.e., to what degree an intervention is implemented correctly) on undergraduate students' mastery of an arbitrary matching to sample task. They found that participants in the reduced integrity conditions at or below 80% were more likely to show stimulus biases (i.e., selecting a particular incorrect stimulus in the presence of a sample stimulus) than participants in integrity conditions at or above 85%. Bergmann et al. did not investigate whether participants were likely to show responding that was biased by position. A position bias is a type of faulty stimulus control that involves allocating more responses to one or a few positions (e.g., first, second, middle, left). We conducted a secondary analysis of data from Bergmann et al., and we used a chi-square goodness of fit test to identify which participants showed a position bias. We found 25 participants out of 168 with potential position biases. We used a chi-square test of independence to analyze the distribution of participants with biased responding by condition and did not find a statistically significant difference. …

Nobel laureate and economist Elinor Ostrom earned a Nobel prize in economic sciences in 2009 for her research on a community's ability to self-govern a common pool resource with the use of eight design principles. While Ostrom's accumulated efforts to analyze these principles and apply them to community resources have earned widespread recognition, these principles have yet to take off on a grand scale as a blueprint for self-governance systems globally. There is also a lack of empirical evidence that supports these principles as empirical investigations have yet to manipulate the principles individually or as an intervention package as independent variables. The purpose of the present study is to empirically test Ostrom's eight design principles in a tabletop game model of a community utilizing a common pool resource (CPR) by implementing as well as removing the principles within an adapted version of the board game Catan. In three groups, the CPR almost always fully crashed in baseline but not when Ostrom's principles were in place as game rules. Results indicated that Ostrom's design principles may organize participant responses and maintain resource levels over time more effectively than without Ostrom's rules applied.