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…

The relative effectiveness of two types of verbal reinforcement and one type of tangible reinforcement on a two-choice discrimination task was determined for middle and lower class male and female preschool children. It is suggested that consideration of baseline and IQ might have reconciled disparate findings of previous studies. (GO)

Three studies, using handicapped children, investigated: effects of three different reinforcement contingencies (positive reinforcement, removal of positive reinforcement, and combination of positive reinforcement and removal of positive reinforcement) on a steady-state discrimination task; effect of a conditioned emotional response procedure on a…

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…

An institutionalized, retarded, adult male's response to verbal commands was increased through the use of positive control of a discriminative stimulus. Operant conditioning was noted as a possible means of enabling retarded individuals to acquire behaviors fundamental to a self-help repetoire. (Editor)

Forty primary school students were randomly assigned into four groups based on the level of pretest approval provision and type of pretest task. The efficacy of social approval as a reinforcing stimulus was then tested on a two-choice discrimination learning task in which every correct response was reinforced by contingent approval presentation.…

Several 3- to 5-year-old children participated in this study designed to discover the necessary procedures to establish nonresponding in preschool children during delay of reinforcement. The children were divided into two groups: (1) the programed group (PG), to which a 60-second delay period was introduced gradually and (2) the baseline group…

Two 4-year-old children were shown the use of an apparatus whereby they could obtain toys and candy by making certain responses. The apparatus was a matching-to-sample device on which were arranged five response buttons in a circle and one in the middle. Each response button had a display window for the stimulus. Four of the five windows on the…