The Good Behavior Game (GBG) is an effective intervention to reduce disruptive behavior. The GBG typically involves immediate stimulus presentation (e.g., delivery of a token) following disruptions; however, experimenters have also removed tokens contingent upon disruptions. In the present study, we compared the effects of the GBG-stimulus…

Research on stimulus-stimulus pairing to induce novel vocalizations in nonverbal children has typically employed response-independent pairing (RIP) procedures to condition speech sounds as reinforcers. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effects of a response-contingent pairing (RCP) procedure on the vocalizations of three…

Although massed-trial instruction, distributed-trial instruction, and task interspersal have been shown to be effective methods of teaching skills to children with autism spectrum disorders, they have not been directly compared. In the current study, we taught 6 children to tact shapes of countries using these methods to determine which would…

This study examined how the amount of effort required to produce a reinforcer influenced subsequent preference for, and strength of, that reinforcer in 7 individuals with intellectual disabilities. Preference assessments identified four moderately preferred stimuli for each participant, and progressive-ratio (PR) analyses indexed reinforcer…

The self-injurious behaviors of nine subjects with developmental disabilities were observed in settings in which play materials, experimenter demands, or social attention were systematically varied. Although there was much between-subject and within-subject variability, higher levels of self-injury were consistently associated with a specific…

Obscene verbalizations in an individual with traumatic brain injury were treated using stimulus fading as the singular form of intervention. Results of a functional assessment revealed the obscenity was maintained by negative reinforcement. Stimulus fading (the gradual reintroduction of instructional demands) produced immediate and substantial…

Performance feedback has facilitated the acquisition and maintenance of a wide range of behaviors (e.g., health-care routines, seat-belt use). Most researchers have attributed the effectiveness of performance feedback to (a) its discriminative functions, (b) its reinforcing functions, or (c) the combination of the two. In this study, we attempted…

This study observed a classroom of 15 students (ages 3 to 11) with behavior disorders, using amount of teacher attention to generate hypotheses about problem behavior function which were then validated in individual functional assessments. For 14 of the students, accurate hypotheses were efficiently generated by noting how teachers distributed…