Association for Behavior Analysis International

Consider the activities during a typical day in the life of an applied behavior analyst: observing clients’ behavior, integrating those observations to develop a plan for treatment, implementing and assessing the treatment plan, explaining the client’s behavior and the treatment plan to those responsible for the clients’ well-being, confronting complicated issues related to the causes of behavior and its explanation, discussing with nonbehavior analysts the client as the agent of his or her own behavior and the client’s thoughts and intentions, and confronting a myriad of ethical issues that arise in the course of treatment. Many of these daily activities require a firm grounding in the science of behavior. Others require an equally firm grounding in the philosophy of that science, in issues that underpin the science of behavior and that rely on that science to provide a coherent framework for processes that do not lend themselves to experimental analysis. This tutorial introduces to practitioners some of the conceptual issues that they face in their interactions with clients and caregivers. Four broad issues will be considered: observations and their integration; cause and explanation; privacy; agency and intention; and responsibility and ethics.

Graduate students and master’s level practitioners of behavior analysis.

Humans often solve problems by engaging in a variety of strategies, some of which involve sequences of covert verbal behavior. The purpose of this talk is to discuss how verbal behavior serves to mediate complex performances such as stimulus categorization. Dr. Miguel will present several studies that have directly manipulated verbal behavior to produce both novel verbal and nonverbal behavior such as arbitrary matching, visual categorization, and analogical responding. Evidence for verbal mediation comes from positive performances on complex conditional discrimination tasks after the use of speaker training alone, and also from spontaneous vocalizations on the specific verbal strategies utilized by participants during or after task completion. He will argue that behavior analysts should continue investigating verbal mediation as a problem-solving strategy, especially in applied settings.

The predictive validity of animal models of memory has been disappointing, suggesting a need for new approaches to development of drug treatments. Many of the traditional procedures derive from the cognitive neuroscience approach and pose interpretive difficulties from a stimulus control perspective. EAB-based techniques (e.g., delayed matching to sample) may not address the complexity of stimulus control necessary for translational significance, but can be adapted to do so. This tutorial will provide a brief overview of procedures used in the behavioral pharmacology of remembering and a consideration of their strengths and weaknesses. It also will provide a more detailed analysis of research using novel procedures that vary the number of stimuli to remember as well as the retention interval. For example, the odor span task can be described as an incrementing nonmatch to sample procedure in which the number of sample stimuli to remember increases on each trial. Early results have shown that NMDA-antagonists, but not other classes of compounds, produce selective impairments on performance in this procedure. Variations of these procedures will be described that develop stimulus control by specific combinations of stimulus properties (what stimulus, when it occurred, and where it was presented), making it possible to study drug effects on "episodic" stimulus control.

Other than research on behavior's basic principles, the analysis of child behavior is the longest sustained program of research in behavior analysis. It includes replications of the basic principles (e.g., reinforcement), analyses of behavior of societal importance (e.g., cooperation), applications to behavior of individual importance (e.g., temper tantrums), and extensions of these applications to parent training (e.g., child socialization). This program's brief history, however, has a long past that includes the histories of behavior analysis (e.g., childrearing practices in Skinner's Walden Two, Bijou's Institute of Child Development, Bijou and Baer's theory of child development), behaviorism (e.g., Watson's classical behaviorism), psychology (e.g., child and developmental psychology), and childrearing and child welfare in America (e.g., Child Welfare Stations). A common connection among these histories is Watson and Watson's 1928 book of childrearing advice, The Psychological Care of Infant and Child. Now more infamous than famous (e.g., "pathological," "punitive") the book is, in part, Watson’s legacy to research, application, and theory in the behavior analysis of development. As such, its fame and infamy bear close examination. In this presentation, Dr. Bigelow will describe Watson’s childrearing advice in the context of the culture, the childrearing, and the advice of his day--and our day; address the criticisms of it in those contexts--and at present; consider the nature and existence of “behavioristic” childrearing advice--then and now; and comment on the legacy of Watson’s advice for the behavior analysis of development today.

Graduate students, practitioners, research scientists, and educators.

"Choice" can be viewed in at least a couple of different ways in school settings. First, it can be viewed as a discrete skill children must display when faced with a choice opportunity. For example, a teacher may say "Do you want chocolate or white milk with your lunch?" To make a choice in this context, the child must display a specific response to indicate his or her choice. Second, it can be viewed as a free operant, in which a discrete "choice" response is not displayed. Rather, in this situation, allocation of behavior is examined. For example, when a teacher asks a question, a child could either shout the answer out or raise his/her hand. This second situation is often misunderstood as a "choice" context. This tutorial will discuss the concept of "choice" in school settings, how choice responding is taught and managed, and the role choice can play in effective behavior management.

Delayed reinforcers are ubiquitous effects of operant contingencies. In psychology's early days, they were mostly viewed as impediments to learning: the more time between an act and its consequences, the slower the learning. Technical problems complicated studies of delay gradients (the functions relating rate of responding to delay): e.g., can we ignore additional responses occurring between a response and its scheduled delayed reinforcer? When several successive responses are followed by a reinforcer, all are followed by that reinforcer, the most recent with the shortest delay. Peter Dews, recognizing the significance of this observation, showed how it could clarify our understanding of performances maintained by reinforcement schedules and pointed the way to surmounting the technical difficulties in determining delay gradients. This tutorial considers the relevance of that experimental history not only for the foundations of our science but also for its applications. For example, in a vast array of instructional applications, correction procedures guarantee that correct responses eventually follow errors; those errors, followed after some delay by reinforcers produced by the subsequent corrects, may persist for that reason. Improving our understanding of delayed reinforcers in both basic and applied settings may therefore help us to enhance our instructional practices.

Especially those who wish to expand their understanding of basic processes, including students, practitioners, and teachers, and all with an interest in the details of the phenomenon of reinforcement.