Perception and perceptual memory play crucial roles in fear generalization, yet their dynamic interaction remains understudied. This research (N = 80) explored their relationship through a classical differential conditioning experiment. Results revealed that while fear context perception fluctuates over time with a drift effect, perceptual memory…

This study investigates crossmodal fear generalization, testing whether conditioned fear spreads between different sensory modalities. Participants in the unimodal group were presented with visual stimuli--images of a sparrow (CS+) and a laptop (CS-)--while the crossmodal group received auditory stimuli--sparrow calls (CS+) and keyboard typing…

Autoclitics are secondary verbal operants that are controlled by a feature of the conditions that occasion or evoke a primary verbal operant such as a tact or mand. Qualifying autoclitics extend, negate, or assert a speaker's primary verbal response and modify the intensity or direction of the listener's behavior. Howard and Rice (1988)…

Fear generalization is one of the main symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. In rodents, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the hippocampus (HPC) control the expression of contextual fear memory generalization. Consistently, ACC projections to the ventral HPC contribute to contextual fear generalization. However, the roles of ACC…

Previous research has investigated generalized intraverbal-tacting by teaching children with autism to respond using autoclitic frames. The present study compared the effectiveness and efficiency of a Frame and a No Frame procedure across counterbalanced stimulus sets with 4 children with autism. In the Frame condition, children were taught to…

There are sex differences in anxiety disorders with regard to occurrence and severity of episodes such that females tend to experience more frequent and more severe episodes. Contextual fear learning and generalization are especially relevant to anxiety disorders, which are often defined by expressing fear and/or anxiety in safe contexts. In…

For most children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), manding for information is an important skill that must be systematically taught. Although previous studies have evaluated interventions for teaching other mands for information, to date no studies have demonstrated effective procedures for teaching the mand "why?" The purpose of the…

Tacts facilitate social interaction, and a strong tact repertoire can lead to the development of other verbal operants. For children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the development of a tact repertoire can reduce stereotypical and repetitive language and increase social communication, as functional language may reduce the amount of…