Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis

Behavioral contrast is defined as a change in reinforcement conditions in one context that causes a change in behavior in the opposite direction in another, unchanged context. Although behavioral contrast has implications for applied behavior analysts, researchers have not examined ramifications or identified common methods of mitigating contrast in applied settings. Therefore, we surveyed Board Certified Behavior Analysts in an exploratory investigation to determine practitioner experiences with behavioral contrast...

Previous research has improved the feasibility and precision of assessments of sociability, but further progress is warranted. The purpose of this study was to evaluate secondary measures and within-session analyses to further improve the feasibility and precision of assessments of sociability. We reanalyzed previously published assessment results to evaluate whether initial and conditional (i.e., on therapist movement) approach and avoidance may approximate established continuous measures. Results indicated that both measures were strongly correlated with the percentage of session on the social side and may provide a more feasible approximation for use in clinical practice...

Children with autism spectrum disorder often demonstrate difficulty communicating with others, and this may affect the extent to which they can engage in contextually appropriate language during play. This study examined the effects of a social script-training intervention using generic picture cues on the number of contextually appropriate play statements for children with autism spectrum disorder. We also examined the extent to which responding generalized to novel toy sets and analyzed play statement types...

The Performance Diagnostic Checklist-Human Services (PDC-HS) is an assessment used to identify variables contributing to staff performance concerns in human-service settings. In the current study, we introduce and assess the test validity, interrater reliability, and test-retest reliability of the PDC-HS (1.1), a revised version of the assessment that included revised instructions, questions, and intervention planning references. We measured the psychometric properties of the revised assessment by analyzing answers obtained from watching video vignettes of simulated interviews between consultants and a supervisor...

The purpose of the current study was to compare the effects of omission and commission errors of reinforcement during tact instruction via telehealth with three children, 6 to 7 years of age, who were diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. We used an adapted alternating treatment design to evaluate skill acquisition of target stimuli across high-integrity, commission errors, and omission errors conditions. The high-integrity condition produced mastery criteria in fewer sessions compared with the integrity-error conditions in four of six comparisons, and the omission condition reached mastery criteria in fewer sessions than the commission condition in five of six comparisons...

The evolutionary theory of behavior dynamics (ETBD) is a genetic algorithm that applies the Darwinian principles of evolutionary biology to model how behavior changes dynamically via selection by contingencies of reinforcement. The ETBD is a complexity theory where low-level rules of selection, reproduction, and mutation operate iteratively to animate "artificial organisms" that generate emergent outcomes. Numerous studies have demonstrated the ETBD can accurately model behavior of live animals in the laboratory, and it has been applied recently to model automatically maintained self-injury...

Previous research has examined the predictive validity of heart rate on destructive behavior; however, such research has yet to improve clinical practice or enhance our understanding of the relation between physiology and destructive behavior. The purpose of this study was to examine the predictive validity of heart rate on varying topographies and functions of destructive behavior while controlling antecedent and consequent events through functional analysis. We first demonstrated the reliability of the Polar H10 heart rate monitor and assessed the feasibility of its use in simulated functional analysis sessions...

One of the diagnostic characteristics of individuals with autism spectrum disorders includes engaging in restricted and repetitive behavior. Research has shown that individuals will often display problem behavior when access to restricted and repetitive behavior is blocked. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the use of functional communication training and schedule thinning to treat aggression displayed by three children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders when higher level restrictive and repetitive behavior was blocked...

Few reviews on procedural fidelity-the degree to which procedures are implemented as designed-provide details to gauge the quality of fidelity reporting in behavior-analytic research. This review focused on experiments in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (2006-2021) with "integrity" or "fidelity" in the abstract or body. When fidelity data were collected, the coders characterized measurement details (e.g., description of calculation, report of single or multiple values, frequency of fidelity checks, checklist use)...

Self-feeding with utensils represents an important step in a child's progression toward age-typical eating and emerges in the absence of intervention for most children. In contrast, children with feeding disorders may lack the skill or motivation to self-feed, which impedes progress toward age-typical eating. In the current study, experimenters used a multielement design to evaluate negative reinforcement in the form of meal termination to transition six participants with a feeding disorder from caregiver-fed to self-fed bites and drinks...

Behavior analysts frequently collaborate with interdisciplinary colleagues to share information and make decisions about client services. This study evaluated the effects of behavioral skills training on preparation for and presentation during interdisciplinary review team meetings by clinicians (n = 4) and nurses (n = 4) at a residential school for students with intellectual and neurodevelopmental disabilities. The primary dependent measure was the percentage of preparation and presentation steps from task-analyzed behavior checklists that the participants implemented correctly...

The purpose of the current study was to conduct a systematic replication of Fiske et al. (2015) to extend the behavior-analytic literature on token reinforcement. Specifically, the researchers addressed several of the limitations of Fiske et al. by including specific conditioning procedures, creating a controlled history of reinforcement with the token system, including participants with and without disabilities to extend the generality of the findings, and equating the magnitude of reinforcement across the primary and paired-token conditions...

Behavioral momentum theory (BMT) suggests that resurgence of destructive behavior may be at least partly determined by the rate of alternative reinforcement, with lean schedules of reinforcement producing less resurgence than dense schedules. Findings from basic and translational studies have been mixed, and the effects of alternative reinforcement rate on resurgence remain unclear. In the current study, we conducted a within-subject evaluation of resurgence during extinction with four children following functional communication training using dense and lean (BMT-informed) schedules of alternative reinforcement...

A concern when conducting combined-category preference assessments is the potential for displacement effects, a shift in the preference ranking from highly preferred to moderately or less preferred for stimuli in two of three stimulus categories (e.g., edible, leisure, or social-interaction). In this study, we evaluated potential displacement effects in combined-category arrays of edible, leisure, and social-interaction stimuli for five individuals with autism. First, single-category paired-stimulus preference assessments were implemented to identify two highly preferred stimuli from each category...

Augmenting competing stimulus assessments by embedding tactics to increase stimulus engagement and disrupt challenging behavior can improve outcomes of treatments for automatically maintained self-injurious behavior, even for treatment-resistant subtypes. This study replicated and extended research on augmented competing stimulus assessments by reporting outcomes for 16 consecutively encountered cases with automatically maintained self-injurious behavior (19 total applications); six participants had treatment-responsive Subtype 1 and 10 had treatment-resistant Subtypes 2 or 3...

Previous behavior-analytic research to improve dance performance has separately demonstrated the efficacy of TAGteach and self-evaluative video feedback. However, no research has directly compared these two interventions. In this study, we used an adapted alternating-treatment design to examine the effects of TAGteach versus self-evaluative video feedback to improve the accuracy of dance movements among four beginner-level dance students. All participants performed better on movements that were taught using TAGteach compared with those that were taught using video self-evaluation...

Equivalence-based instruction (EBI) is an efficient and efficacious methodology to establish equivalence classes that has been used to teach various academic skills to neurotypical adults. Although previous reviews confirmed the utility of EBI with participants with developmental disabilities, it is unclear whether certain procedural parameters are associated with positive equivalence outcomes. We extended previous reviews by categorizing studies that used EBI with individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and assessed whether any procedural parameters were associated with better equivalence responding...

Instruction in auditory-visual conditional discriminations for young children with autism spectrum disorder is typically based on either a conditional-only or a simple-conditional method. In this study, we evaluated a modified simple-conditional method in which we removed the steps for which visual comparisons were presented in isolation. We compared this modified simple-conditional method with the conditional-only method when teaching auditory-visual conditional discriminations to six young Chinese children with autism spectrum disorder...

Conditioned reinforcers are widely used in applied behavior analysis. Basic research evidence reveals that Pavlovian learning plays an important role in the acquisition and efficacy of new conditioned-reinforcer functions. Thus, a better understanding of Pavlovian principles holds the promise of improving the efficacy of conditioned reinforcement in applied research and practice. This paper surveys how (and if) Pavlovian principles are presented in behavior-analytic textbooks; imprecisions and knowledge gaps within contemporary Pavlovian empirical findings are highlighted...

Subtypes of automatically maintained self-injurious behavior (SIB) have been defined based on response patterns observed during the functional analysis, which are thought to reflect each subtype's distinct mechanisms. Current practice for identifying subtypes involves using structured criteria to identify whether SIB is automatically maintained, followed by the application of additional criteria to identify the subtype. We describe a series of studies directed at simplifying these methods to facilitate wider application of the subtyping model in research and practice...