To establish a series of derived relations between arbitrary stimuli, 20 subjects were exposed to nonarbitrary and arbitrary relational training and testing procedures. Subjects were then exposed to an avoidance conditioning procedure in which one member from each relation was established as a discriminative stimulus for avoidance and…

Children may recruit their teachers' attention at undesirably high rates or at inconvenient times. Tiger and Hanley (2004) described a multiple-schedule procedure to reduce ill-timed requests, which involved providing children with two distinct continuous signals that were correlated with periods in which teacher attention was either available or…

Functional analyses were conducted during a double-blind, placebo-controlled study of the atypical antipsychotic medication risperidone with 13 individuals. Risperidone was effective in reducing destructive behavior (compared to placebo) for 10 participants. For 7 of these responders, an undifferentiated pattern of responding occurred across their…

Reinforcers lose their effectiveness when they are presented repeatedly. Early researchers labeled this loss of effectiveness as "satiation" without conducting an experimental analysis. When such an analysis is conducted, "habituation" provides a more precise and empirically accurate label for the changes in reinforcer effectiveness. This paper…

Relative efficiency of hand raising and response cards within the context of an ABAB design when teaching time to middle school students with moderate and severe disabilities was investigated. Effects of the two strategies were assessed on four dependent variables: (a) student active responding, (b) on-task behavior, (c) inappropriate behavior,…