Association for Behavior Analysis International

When the explicit training of a class of responses of one topography leads to the emission of one or more response classes of different topography, we speak of generalized operants. The empirical demonstration of such generalized classes is taken as evidence that the concept can be included in the conceptual toolkit of the behavior analyst without further analysis and that it can be used to explain other examples of emergent behavior. Dr. David C. Palmer will argue that this conclusion is unjustified. He will suggest that atomic repertoires can explain the relevant behavior economically, with no need to invent new explanatory terms. Furthermore, they offer a possible interpretation of the phenomenon of delayed observational learning.

Anyone with an interest in parsimonious interpretations of complex behavior.

Self-injurious Behavior (SIB) is one of the most serious problems experienced by individuals with autism and intellectual disabilities. In most cases, functional analysis indicates that SIB is reinforced by caregiver reactions (e.g., attention). In roughly 25% of cases, however, SIB levels are unaffected by social consequences. In such cases, the term "automatic" reinforcement is used because the behavior is assumed to produce its own reinforcement. In contrast to the numerous categories of social functions, automatic SIB remains a single but poorly understood category--one in great need of further explication. Although the body of research on the biological bases of SIB and pharmacological treatment of SIB has produced some meaningful findings, it informs us little about automatic SIB in particular because the majority of studies neither report on the function of SIB or have any exclusion criteria listed that would allow us to hypothesize about the function. The current discussion will summarize our initial efforts to classify automatic SIB into subtypes according to patterns of responding during the functional analysis and the presence of self-restraint--based on the premise that these observable features reflect distinct functional properties of SIB unique to each subtype.

It is widely known that Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention (EIBI) can produce large gains in social, cognitive, and language development. Changes in performance are typically measured using norm-referenced standardized assessment tools which produce a score of overall functioning level. During the past 15 years, Dr. Rebecca P. F. MacDonald and colleagues have developed an assessment tool for the direct measurement of autism specific symptomatology. The Early Skills Assessment Tool (ESAT) includes measures of imitation, language, joint attention, play, and stereotypic behavior (MacDonald et al., 2014). In their most recent work, 83 children with autism (CWA), ages 1, 2, and 3 years old and 58 same-aged typically developing children were assessed using the ESAT. CWA were assessed at entry into an EIBI program and again after one year of treatment. While significant gains were seen in all children across all age groups, the greatest gains were seen in the children who entered treatment before their second birthday. Long-term follow up data suggest long lasting gains in these children. These findings underscore the importance autism screening at 12 to 18 months, the critical role of pediatricians in early identification of ASD and the need for high quality EIBI for all identified children.

Social behavior is a topic of enormous scientific importance that spans disciplines from neuroscience to anthropology. While the topic has received a good deal of empirical and theoretical attention outside behavior analysis, it has largely been neglected within the field. This is unfortunate, as behavior analysis has much to contribute to this field, both methodologically and conceptually. In this talk, Dr. Timothy Hackenberg will describe some recent work in the comparative analysis of social behavior and how behavior-analytic methods and concepts can be usefully brought to bear on such work. He will focus on three areas of research and interpretation, using some recent research from his laboratory with rats for illustration. The first is concerned with cooperative behavior, in which rats coordinate their responses in relation to a mutual reinforcement contingency. The second is concerned with reciprocal behavior, in which two rats produce reinforcement for each other, alternating roles of producer and receiver. The third is concerned with the reinforcing value of social interaction, assessed in relation to food reinforcement and under various deprivation conditions. Together, these studies illustrate some ways in which behavior-analytic methods and concepts can contribute to the interdisciplinary science of social behavior.

Basic and applied scientists.

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has a strategic plan that calls for “the development, for research purposes, of new ways of classifying psychopathology based on dimensions of observable behavior and neurobiological measures.” Collectively, these dimensions form the Research Domain Criteria project (RDoC) and include several dimensions of potential interest to behavior analysts, for example, positive valence systems that incorporating reward learning, responsiveness to reward, and preference-based decision-making. Several funding initiatives based on better characterizing these dimensions have been instituted and future consideration of these dimensions in guiding funding priorities is acknowledged. This symposium describes the various dimensions of the RDoC relevant to behavior analysts, and potential knowledge gaps that behavioral research could address. The symposium also provides several examples from established investigators illustrating how these dimensions may be applied to behavioral research focused directly on mental health and on drug abuse, which is associated with co-occurring mental health disorders, as well as these investigators’ perspectives on this dimensional system of behavior classification.

Psychologists, behavior analysts, practitioners, and graduate students.

While DSM5 provides ways to classify psychopathologies, the National Institute of Mental Health has recognized that understanding the antecedents and progression of disorders, as well as stimulating research on new treatments, may require new ways of classifying mental disorders based on dimensions of observable behavior and neurobiological measures. The implementation of this strategy has been named the Research Domain Criteria Project (RDoC). This talk will describe the background impetus for the RDoC project, the various domains of interest and the constructs included in those domains, and levels of analysis (from circuits to behavior) identified as critical research foci by work groups of scientists. However, domains and constructs of specific interest to behavioral analysis will provide the main focus. A brief overview of the knowledge gaps identified by NIMH and areas of high priority for research will be described, including explicit suggestions from NIMH for how these domains should be used to focus future research efforts by basic and clinician-scientists.

ADHD is a common psychiatric condition that is characterized clinically by developmentally inappropriate levels of inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. There has long been recognition that this disorder is associated with disruptions in responsiveness to reward and reinforcement learning. More recently, the neurobiological and neuropharmacological substrates underlying these disruptions have been increasingly elucidated. It is argued that careful behavior analytic inquiry into the nature of behavior-consequence relations among those with ADHD can help advance knowledge about ADHD and its association with other problem behaviors, like substance abuse, and that such an experimental approach lies squarely within the National Institute of Mental Health RDoC framework for conceptualizing psychopathology. Examples of human operant and behavioral pharmacology studies of patients with a clinical diagnosis of ADHD will be reviewed and discussed.

The revolution in what we know about verbal behavior development changes how we should intervene and teach children with language delays, social deficits, and cochlear implants. These findings determine how we should teach children in general education as well as special education. Empirically identified verbal development cusps are driven by the presence or absence of learned social reinforcers including how, or if, these can be acquired from social learning contexts. Social learning itself is a behavioral developmental cusp also driven by learned reinforcers. Tested protocols can establish missing cusps, resulting in significant advances in children’s social, verbal, and educational prognoses.

Psychologists, behavior analysts, practitioners, and graduate students.

A large and growing evidence base suggests that in order for language topographies to be verbal learned social reinforcers must be present as a function of incidental experiences or design. Establishing new reinforcers for observing responses and social reinforcers appear key to the advancement of verbal development and social development. Evidence across the range of verbal developmental cusps and social development suggest that if you build social reinforcers, verbal behavior will come. These findings point to the essential role of the establishment of collaborative reinforcement in verbal development.

The identification of verbal developmental cusps and protocols to establish them has utility for children with cochlear implants. The relevant protocols include conditioning voices, listener literacy, various naming interventions, and other protocols that act to join the speaker-as-own-listener within the skin and to establish vocal verbal stimulus control. Using these protocols in conjunction with see and say signs holds promise for advancing the reading achievement of deaf and hard-of-hearing students.

Verbal behavior is fundamentally social. Its development requires the establishment not only of verbal operants, but their reinforcers. Without the proper reinforcers, social behavior and subsequent language will not develop. Evidence exists that new reinforcers can be conditioned through social contingencies, that is, by observation. This paper will present an overview of what research has told us about the observational conditioning of new reinforcers, and how it relates to verbal development.

We report several studies on infants' progression from vocalizations to early verbal operants. Experiment 1 showed infants vocalizations were shaped and maintained by adult echoics. Experiment 2 compared two groups of 3- to 8-month-old infants using a multi-element probe design with a noncontingent reinforcement control condition and two forms of contingent reinforcement. This distinguished between the reinforcing effects of contingent maternal echoics and motherese speech from the eliciting effects of noncontingent vocal stimuli. Experiment 3 tested the effects of an intensive tact protocol on increases in mands and tacts. Collectively, the research shows the importance of social reinforcement on verbal development.