Association for Behavior Analysis International

This symposium will discuss Russ Church’s research contributions and how the panelists have built on them in their own research to determine how to assess individual differences in timing abilities, the effects of environmental and pharmacological manipulations, and the neurobiology of timing.

Basic and translational investigators interested in applying MPR, board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.

Russell (Russ) Church was a dominant figure in the study of timing processes and how those processes influenced other cognitive processes. During my time as a post-doctoral fellow in his laboratory, Russ and I studied the role of timing processes in classical (Pavlovian) conditioning which led to the development of the Packet theory of timing and conditioning. My laboratory subsequently migrated to studying timing and impulsive choices, but there are multiple areas of our current research program where Russ’ influence is still apparent. This presentation will discuss recent research from my laboratory on the role of temporal attention and other timing processes in impulsive choice procedures in rats. Impulsive choice tasks present choices between a smaller-sooner and a larger-later reward, where the smaller-sooner is the impulsive choice. When rats were required to engage in active (versus passive) timing, they were more self-controlled, showed greater delay sensitivity, and demonstrated stronger preferences for the larger reward (when the delays were the same). The results suggest that tasks that engage temporal attention may be beneficial to reducing impulsive choices. Time-based interventions that involve repeated exposure to delays promoted self-control regardless of temporal attention demands. The interface of timing processes and impulsive choices can provide key insights into understanding the fundamental facets of the timing and decision-making systems.

Russell Church contributed immensely to our understanding of Timing, the ability of animals and humans to discriminate intervals and durations of events. In this talk, I will analyze some of Church’s empirical studies, including his seminal “Bisection of Temporal Intervals”, and his theoretical models, from the influential Scalar Expectancy Theory to the more recent Modular Theory of Timing. I will also explain how Russell Church’s ideas and findings shaped our work on how animals learn to time.

Armando Machado obtained his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at Duke University. His research on the conditions in which pigeons generate highly variable, random-like behavior received the Annual Dissertation Award from Division 25 of the American Psychological Association. After his PhD, Armando joined Indiana University as an Assistant and then a tenured Associate professor. In 2000 he moved to the University of Minho where he became Full professor, and in 2019 he moved to the University of Aveiro. Armando’s research focuses on temporal learning, numerical discrimination, choice, and decision making in animals. In 2010 he received the Research Merit Award from the School of Psychology, and in 2014 he received the Scientific Merit Award from the University of Minho. He has served as Editor of the journal Behavior and Philosophy and Associate Editor of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review and the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. He was the President and Program Chair of the Society for the Quantitative Analysis of Behavior, and the first president of the Portuguese Association of Experimental Psychology.

By 2015, Russ Church decided to write a book that he never got a chance to finish. I was fortunate enough to be his coauthor. Its title—Temporal Conditioning: How Rats Learn—conveyed his view that timing and conditioning should be understood together. But the contents of the book conveyed a way of thinking about research that is so often left out of print. This talk will focus on Russ Church’s evolving views on animal behavior from 2005 to 2015, and where he hoped his ideas would lead. I’ll use this to describe how Russ thought about research—the flow from procedure to psychological model, and from model to evaluation.

David Freestone earned a Ph.D. in Russ Church’s lab in 2012. After a post-doc in neuroeconomics (NYU), he became a professor. His work focused on timing, conditioning, and value-based decision-making. These days, David works as a researcher and data scientist at a virtual eating disorder treatment center, and consults with animal facilities toward building robust data infrastructure to support the welfare of their animals.

In this presentation, I reflect on the impact Russ Church had on me and my research trajectory. I briefly describe my research on basic timing mechanisms. Next, I describe how timing research and immersion in the Church lab impacted my entry into research on memory. Finally, I describe the importance of time in the development of animal models of episodic memory.

Systems may be formal or a result of self-organized selection of behaviors. We often talk about for instance a school system referring to the formal, planned and intentionally organized teaching and support services. A system may, however, as well arise without any formal structure, planning or intentionality. OBM, or the science of how to facilitate optimal contingencies for behaviors that serves the goals of the company, have to deal with both formal and informal functions, structures, and processes. These structures, whether visualized by an organization chart or a snapshot of network interactions, must also take culture into consideration. This presentation will show how the transmission of cultural practices over time influence both formal and informal systems.

Everyone interested in how organizations work, whether businesses or public sector.

As the school-age population continues to diversify, it is now more important than ever that we provide services with a social justice focus that recognizes and values individuals’ unique identities and dismantles systems of oppression and marginalization. With a particular focus on school-based intervention, we will discuss a social justice approach to service delivery. Implications for integrating an ecological-behavioral framework with a social justice approach informed by critical race theory, intersectionality, and dis/ability critical race studies will be discussed. We will discuss the adaptation of evidence-based interventions to fit various contexts, as well as the development of novel interventions built specifically for minoritized populations. We will also examine peer-mediated interventions as a promising suite of culturally relevant strategies.

Peer relations serve many important functions in children’s development. Social reciprocity or reciprocal peer interactions occur when children engage in social interactions with one another or when their actions support each other in their relationships. In autism spectrum disorder (ASD), however, reciprocity of social exchange is missing and is manifest as a lack of both social responses and initiations to other people. Over the years, various behavioral strategies have been developed to promote social interactions between children with ASD and their peers for a successful integration in inclusion settings. Video modelling, as one of them, is not only an effective and evidence-based method for developing many social and play skills, but it can also be a practical and efficient tool that is well-suited to the school environment. In this presentation, pertinent video modeling methodologies will be explored and specific suggestions on the effective use of video modeling will be provided.

Graduate students; RBTs; board certified behavior analysts (BCBA); board certified assistant behavior analysts (BCaBA); psychologists; therapists and special educators working in a variety of applied and experimental settings as well as educational and social science settings who are interested in the promotion of social and play skills in children with ASD.

Children and adults with ASD often have multiple nutritional and metabolic problems, including nutritional deficiencies, food intolerances, oxidative stress, decreased methylation, and impaired mitochondrial function. Many of these problems can be addressed by nutritional supplements and healthy allergen-free diets. A 12 month comprehensive nutritional intervention study was conducted to investigate the effect of combining 6 different nutritional interventions. The study found many benefits, including a 7 point gain in non-verbal IQ (compared to zero in the control group) and an 18 month gain in developmental age (vs 4 months in the control group). This suggests that many individuals with ASD can benefit from a comprehensive nutritional intervention to address underlying nutritional and metabolic problems.

BCBA’s and other professionals who work with children with ASD.

Health behavior promotion in childhood has been dominated by knowledge-centered paradigms. However, research shows that beliefs about what is healthy have a stronger influence on behavior than factual knowledge. Motivation and self-regulation frameworks highlight the agent role of the individual in controlling the personal, behavioral, and environmental influences that impact one’s behavior. Although individuals may be influenced and regulated by external factors and agents, exclusively relying on external regulation does not allow the individual to develop adaptive competences and skills, such as choosing a healthy snack. The aim of this presentation is to describe how healthy habits in childhood can be promoted, including diet and sleep, through the modelling of self-regulation skills via story-tools/narrative-based programs.

Anyone interested in motivation and self-regulation, and health behavior promotion

All interested in behavior analysis, experimental analysis, the self, rule-governed behavior, relational frame theory, and clinical behavior analysis

Behavior analysis students, practitioners, and researchers.

For over a decade, CABAS was implemented in Italy by several learning centers that aimed to test the effects of education as a social innovation tool. We found that this model can provide schools and health services with an evidence-based system to design interventions that are both effective and efficient. Also, it greatly contributed to maintaining treatment integrity for children and adults with autism spectrum disorder during the COVID-19 pandemic. During these challenging times of economic and health crisis across the world, consequences for failing to design early and efficient ABA treatments were being highlighted by researchers. In addition, all countries in terms of reaching the “sustainable development goals” (SDGs) for fighting educational poverty, can do so only by providing people with a disability with individualized proper interventions. CABAS was able to offer help with identifying criteria for effective behavioral interventions, with particular attention to highly critical groups, such as people with autism. Luckily, the science of teaching provides researchers all over the world with a system to measure education. A growing number of research findings show that CABAS is among the most cost-effective educational model in the world. Moreover, its implementation across all age groups and for both special and general education, suggest that it is a cross-cultural, flexible tool for different contexts. Therefore, in Italy, we implemented it as a tactic within social, health and school services, for individuals with and without disability, from 18 months to adulthood. We found that the implementation of such a comprehensive model of education fits the need for sustainability of welfare systems drastically different from those in the United States. CABAS® was first replicated in Italy in 1991 and further expended through a great deal of applied research across various fields and disciplines. International replications are paving the way for further research and trans-disciplinary analysis of its effects, using longitudinal measurements and both criterion and norm-based data.

ABA master and Ph.D. students, school directors, supervisors, service managers, community health advocates

Applied behavior analysis (ABA) is the “gold standard” for service provision aimed at helping young children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, the increased attention to this population may be detracting from the value associated with taking an ABA approach to support individuals of all ages, across a range of diagnoses. Further, the shift to define ABA as medically necessary for individuals diagnosed with ASD (APBA, April 10, 2020) requires effective patient, provider, and payor collaboration, and recent publications have highlighted the need for structured approaches to decision-making based in analytical ethics to support this transition. Accordingly, APBA released guidelines directing practitioners to provide services based on individualized risk exposure requiring a more patient-informed approach to care. The purpose of the current presentation is to outline a collaborative risk-driven approach designed to help guide practitioners to make ethically informed decisions regarding ABA service delivery, regardless of setting, age, or severity. Considerations regarding a potential divide between science and ABA-based service delivery will be addressed, including misconceptions about that which defines our professional and ethical obligations; specifically, how our related responsibilities extend far beyond particular ABA-based clinical programming procedures, necessitating constant empirical evaluation of the overall continuity of care for a given individual (e.g., placement, transition, community-based activities, and more).

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students