We used an adapted alternating treatments design to compare the effects of traditional and embedded discrete trial teaching (DTT) with adults with autism. Traditional DTT consisted of the instructor presenting a discriminative stimulus to start each trial ("Point to___"), implementing a prompt (i.e., manual guidance), and providing…

We evaluated the effects of a discrimination training procedure for establishing praise as a reinforcer for three children with autism spectrum disorder. After establishing two praise words as discriminative stimuli and two nonsense words as S-deltas, we evaluated whether the stimuli then functioned as reinforcers by presenting each stimulus as a…

Previous attempts to condition a 1-celled organism, paramecium, by either classical or instrumental procedures, have yielded equivocal results. The present experiments were designed to determine whether the use of positive reinforcement provided by DC electrical stimulation at the cathode, which had previously been shown to be attractive to…

The study involving three mentally retarded children (7 to 10 years old) compared the effectiveness of preventing incorrect responses with allowing trial and error responses to a set of verbal instructions. Data provided further evidence for the notion of errorless discrimination learning. (SB)

In this article, the author discusses and presents seven possibilities that describe how symmetry principles are reflected in behavior analysis. First, if there are apparently no functional distinctions to be made between positive and negative reinforcement, then reinforcer effectiveness (by various measures) is invariant under a simple inversion…

Response and reinforcement features of operant discrimination paradigms used in audiometric assessment were investigated with normal 17-month-old children. Findings indicated more responses prior to onset of habituation when response tasks involved complex central processing skills and a twofold increase in number of subject responses when…

Five adults with Prader-Willi syndrome (characterized by short stature, learning difficulties, incomplete sexual development, and uncontrollable eating) learned the conditional relations necessary for the formation of two equivalence classes under differential/nondifferential and edible/nonedible outcomes. Performance on test trials was better…

In this study, 24 individuals (ages 6-37) with down syndrome had to learn a symbolic conditional discrimination task. Participants showed better terminal accuracy and faster learning of the task when the alternative correct responses were each followed by unique different outcomes than when nondifferential outcomes were arranged. (Contains…

Reports that praise and extrinsic reinforcers, such as candy, increased the rate of letter recognition in preschool children and that the increase was partially maintained when the reinforcement was removed. (FL)

Using a conditioned suppression task, we investigated extinction and renewal of Pavlovian modulation in human sequential Feature Positive (FP) discrimination learning. In Experiment 1, in context a participants were first trained on two FP discriminations, X[right arrow]A+/A- and Y[right arrow]B+/B-. Extinction treatment was administered in the…