The current study extends the literature on task interspersal (TI) by comparing the effects of four different TI ratios on the efficiency of skill acquisition and on levels of problem behavior in children with autism spectrum disorder and related disorders. The four ratios of TI were 3:1, 1:1, 1:3, and 0:1 mastered-to-acquisition tasks. An adapted…

We trained four undergraduate students who reported no prior experience implementing behavior-analytic procedures to conduct a paired-stimulus preference assessment using a video self-instruction package. The package was composed of several components from prior research (i.e., a voice-over script, written instructions, multiple video models per…

Research on tact acquisition by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has often focused on teaching participants to tact visual stimuli. It is important to evaluate procedures for teaching tacts of nonvisual stimuli (e.g., olfactory, tactile). The purpose of the current study was to extend the literature on secondary target instruction and…

We used a script-fading package to teach children with autism to initiate social interactions across various activities in the school setting, and we programmed for generalization in the untrained home setting with a sibling. The three participants, ages 8 to 10 years, demonstrated deficits in social initiations with their peers. During baseline,…

The Good Behavior Game (GBG) is an effective intervention to reduce disruptive behavior. The GBG typically involves immediate stimulus presentation (e.g., delivery of a token) following disruptions; however, experimenters have also removed tokens contingent upon disruptions. In the present study, we compared the effects of the GBG-stimulus…

Research on stimulus-stimulus pairing to induce novel vocalizations in nonverbal children has typically employed response-independent pairing (RIP) procedures to condition speech sounds as reinforcers. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effects of a response-contingent pairing (RCP) procedure on the vocalizations of three…

We taught 4 participants with autism to discriminate between the reinforced and nonreinforced responses of an adult model and evaluated the effectiveness of this intervention using a multiple baseline design. During baseline, participants were simply exposed to adult models' correct and incorrect responses and the respective consequences of each.…

Script-fading procedures have been shown to be effective for teaching children with autism to initiate and participate in social interactions without vocal prompts from adults. In previous script and script-fading research, however, there has been no demonstration of a generalized repertoire of vocal interactions under the control of naturally…

A multiple baseline design across participants was used to demonstrate the effects of a script-training procedure on the peer-to-peer communication of 3 children with autism spectrum disorder during group play with peers. Both scripted and unscripted initiations as well as responses to peers increased for all 3 participants. Stimulus…

Keyboarding skill is an important target for adult education programs due to the ubiquity of computers in modern work environments. A previous study showed that novice typists learned key locations quickly but that fluency took a relatively long time to develop. In the present study, novice typists achieved fluent performance in nearly half the…

Two studies were conducted that examined the preference of a student diagnosed with a brain injury. In Study 1, a preference assessment was followed by a three-choice concurrent operants reinforcer assessment. Two choices resulted in access to preferred activities for completing work, and a third choice resulted in access to nothing (i.e., no…

A functional analysis suggested that rumination exhibited by an adult with autism was maintained by automatic reinforcement. Next, a preference assessment with three flavor sprays (i.e., flavored sprays used by dieters) showed that apple pie spray was most preferred. Finally, the effects of fixed-time delivery of the apple pie spray on levels of…

One child with developmental disabilities was taught to mand for attention by saying "excuse me." Treatment effects were extended to multiple training contexts by teaching the participant to attend to naturally occurring discriminative stimuli through differential reinforcement of communication during periods of the experimenter's nonbusy…

Three experiments involving college adults, retarded adults, and adolescents and normal preschoolers examined the efficacy of three methods of presenting stimuli (successive, simultaneous, or a combination) in object- naming tasks. Results were consistent in showing better posttest performance for Ss in the simultaneous and combined conditions.…

A study of three adults with profound mental retardation investigated the effects of using systematically assessed preferred stimuli versus staff opinion-based preferred stimuli on increasing happiness indices. Preferred stimuli based on preference assessments were more consistently accompanied by increased happiness indices than were preferred…