Practical Considerations for Researchers at Teaching-Focused Colleges.

Growth in the discipline of behavior analysis depends on research production in basic, translational, and applied areas from a variety of perspectives and research groups. Although doctoral programs in behavior analysis prepare students to become productive researchers, leading behavior-analytic journals tend to publish articles from a more circumscribed set of researchers than might be expected given the recent growth in the field. One reason may be that as new researchers graduate from their training programs, they take positions in very different environments from those of their training, such as teaching-focused colleges or clinical settings.

Willingness to produce disadvantageous outcomes in cooperative tasks is modulated by recent experience.

Cooperative behavior represents a situation in which individuals sometimes act in a way that produces a gain to another at a cost to themselves. This may be explained by a history of repeated interactions with others in which such behavior has resulted in reciprocal cooperation from others. Sometimes, even with reciprocal cooperation, gains and costs are unbalanced between partners.

Reciprocity With Unequal Payoffs: Cooperative and Uncooperative Interactions Affect Disadvantageous Inequity Aversion.

Cooperation among unrelated individuals can evolve through reciprocity. Reciprocal cooperation is the process in which lasting social interactions provide the opportunity to learn about others' behavior, and to further predict the outcome of future encounters. Lasting social interactions may also decrease aversion to unequal distribution of gains - when individuals accept inequity payoffs knowing about the possibility of future encounters.

Expansion of Sidman's theory: The inclusion of prompt stimuli in equivalence classes.

Stimulus equivalence is defined as the ability to relate stimuli in novel ways after training in which not all of the stimuli had been directly linked to one another. Sidman (2000) suggested all elements of conditional discrimination training contingencies that result in equivalence potentially become class members. Research has demonstrated the inclusion of samples, comparisons, responses, and reinforcers in equivalence classes.

The establishment of auditory-visual equivalence classes with a go/no-go successive matching-to-sample procedure.

The current study evaluated the effectiveness of a go/no-go successive matching-to-sample procedure (S-MTS) to establish auditory-visual equivalence classes with college students. A sample and a comparison were presented, one at a time, in the same location. During training, after an auditory stimulus was presented, a green box appeared in the center of the screen for participants to touch to produce the comparison.

An update on the search for symmetry in nonhumans.

Sidman et al.'s (1982) failure to find evidence for symmetry (bidirectional associations between stimuli) in monkeys and baboons set the stage for decades of work on emergent relations in nonhumans. They attributed the failure to the use of procedures that did not (1) promote stimulus control based on the relation between the sample and correct comparison and (2) reduce control by irrelevant stimulus features.

Membership of Defined Responses in Stimulus Classes.

Sidman (2000) has suggested that in addition to conditional and discriminative stimuli, class-consistent defined responses can also become part of an equivalence class. In the current study, this assertion was tested using a mixed-schedule procedure that allowed defined response patterns to be "presented" as samples in the absence of different occasioning stimuli. Four typically developing adults were first trained to make distinct response topographies to two visual color stimuli, and then were taught to match those color stimuli to two different form-sample stimuli in a matching task.

Thematic Matching as Remedial Teaching for Symbolic Matching for Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Matching-to-sample (MTS) is often used to teach symbolic relationships between spoken or printed words and their referents to children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. However, many children have difficulty learning symbolic matching, even though they may demonstrate generalized identity matching. The current study investigated whether training on symbolic MTS tasks in which the stimuli are physically dissimilar but members of familiar categories (i.

Evidence for response membership in stimulus classes by pigeons.

Response membership in pigeons' stimulus-class formation was evaluated using associative symmetry and class expansion tests. In Experiment 1, pigeons learned hue-hue (AA) and form-form (BB) successive matching plus a modified hue-form (AB) task in which reinforcement was contingent upon a left versus right side-key response after the positive AB sequences. On subsequent BA (symmetry) probe trials, pigeons responded more often to the comparisons on the reverse of the positive than negative AB sequences and, more importantly, preferentially pecked the side key consistent with symmetry after the reversed positive sequences.

Contextual influences on resistance to disruption in children with intellectual disabilities.

Training context can influence resistance to disruption under differing reinforcement schedules. With nonhumans, when relatively lean and rich reinforcement schedules are experienced in the context of a multiple schedule, greater resistance is found in the rich than the lean component, as described by behavioral momentum theory. By contrast, when the schedules are experienced in separated blocks of sessions (i.

Evaluation of resistance to change under different disrupter conditions in children with autism and severe intellectual disability.

Translational research inspired by behavioral momentum theory in the area of developmental disabilities has shown effects in individuals over a range of functioning levels. In the current study, behavioral momentum was assessed in 6 children diagnosed with autism and severe intellectual disability. In a repeated measures design, participants were exposed to relatively rich versus lean reinforcement contingencies in a multiple schedule with food reinforcers.

The search for symmetry: 25 years in review.

It has been 25 years since the publication of Sidman et al.'s (1982) report on the search for symmetry in nonhuman animals. They attributed their nonhuman subjects' failure to the absence of some critical experiences (e.

REVERSAL LEARNING SET AND FUNCTIONAL EQUIVALENCE IN CHILDREN WITH AND WITHOUT AUTISM.

To evaluate whether children with and without autism could exhibit (a) functional equivalence in the course of yoked repeated-reversal training and (b) reversal learning set, 6 children, in each of two experiments, were exposed to simple discrimination contingencies with three sets of stimuli. The discriminative functions of the set members were yoked and repeatedly reversed. In Experiment 1, all the children (of preschool age) showed gains in the efficiency of reversal learning across reversal problems and behavior that suggested formation of functional equivalence.

A NOVEL METHOD FOR TEACHING THE FIRST INSTANCES OF SIMPLE DISCRIMINATION TO NONVERBAL CHILDREN WITH AUTISM IN A LABORATORY ENVIRONMENT.

A novel method for initiating discrimination training with nonverbal children combines a delayed S+ procedure that requires children to refrain from responding to either of 2 physically different choice stimuli until a prompt stimulus is added onto 1 of the choices, and a delayed prompting procedure that presents the same 2-choice stimulus display, but stimuli are initially added onto both choices. After a short delay, the added stimulus on the S- is removed, and the choice of the S+ is thus prompted. If the children learn to observe and respond to the defining features of the S+ choice stimulus, then they may respond to the S+ prior to the added-stimulus removal.

When is a failure to replicate not a type II error?

Zentall and Singer (2007) challenge our conclusion that the work-ethic effect reported by Clement, Feltus, Kaiser, and Zentall (2000) may have been a Type I error by arguing that (a) the effect has been extensively replicated and (b) the amount of overtraining our pigeons received may not have been sufficient to produce it. We believe that our conclusion is warranted because (a) the original effect has not been replicated despite multiple attempts to do so and (b) the statement that more extended overtraining may be needed itself suggests that the original effect is not reliable.

Failure to replicate the 'work ethic" effect in pigeons.

We report six unsuccessful attempts to replicate the "work ethic" phenomenon reported by Clement, Feltus, Kaiser, and Zentall (2000). In Experiments 1-5, pigeons learned two simultaneous discriminations in which the S+ and S- stimuli were obtained by pecking an initial stimulus once or multiple (20 or 40) times. Subsequent preference tests between the S+ stimuli and between the S- stimuli mostly revealed indifference, on average, between the S+ from the multiple-peck (high-effort) trials and the S+ from the one-peck (low-effort) trials, and likewise between the two respective Sstimuli.

The role of common reinforced comparison responses in acquired sample equivalence.

Different samples occasioning the same reinforced comparison response in matching-to-sample are interchangeable for one another outside of original training. The present studies were designed to verify the role of these common responses in producing acquired sample equivalence by explicitly varying the presence or absence of this commonality during training. In each of the two experiments, one group of pigeons made the same reinforced choice response following multiple sample stimuli, whereas controls either made different reinforced choices following each sample (Experiment 1) or reinforced choices after only two of four center-key stimuli (Experiment 2).

A procedure for generating differential "sample" responding without different exteroceptive stimuli.

Sidman (1994, 2000) suggested that responses as well as stimuli can join equivalence classes, a hypothesis difficult to test because differential responding typically requires different stimuli. The present experiments describe a procedure with pigeons that avoids this potential confounding effect. In Experiment 1, spacing two responses 3 s apart (a differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate [DRL] schedule) to a white stimulus on some trials produced food or the comparison stimuli in a matching task, whereas pecking 10 or more times with no temporal restrictions (a fixed-ratio [FR] schedule) produced the same effect on other trials.

Stimulus control topographies and tests of symmetry in pigeons.

Pigeons were tested for symmetry after A-B training under conditions designed to avoid problems that may prevent its emergence, namely the change of stimulus location in testing relative to training and the lack of requisite discrimination training. In Experiment 1, samples appeared in two locations during baseline training to minimize the impact of stimulus location. Experiments 2 and 3 included multiple-location training along with additional identity and symbolic matching training, respectively, to explicitly train all of the simultaneous and successive stimulus discriminations required for testing.

The development of emergent differential sample behavior in pigeons.

Three experiments attempted to replicate Manabe, Kawashima, and Staddon's (1995) finding of emergent differential sample behavior in budgerigars that has been interpreted as evidence of functional equivalence class formation. In Experiments 1 and 2, pigeons initially learned two-sample/ two-alternative matching to sample in which comparison presentation was contingent on pecking one sample on a differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate (DRL) schedule and the other on a fixed-ratio (FR) schedule. Later, two new samples were added to the task.