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)…

This study examined if listener behavior and responding by exclusion would emerge after training 3 participants with autism to tact stimuli. Tacts for 2 of 3 stimuli were directly trained using discrete trial training methodology and were followed by an auditory-visual discrimination probe in which auditory-visual discrimination by naming (i.e.,…

Studies on teaching tacts to individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have primarily focused on visual stimuli, despite published clinical recommendations to teach tacts of stimuli in other sensory domains as well. In the current study, two children with ASD were taught to tact auditory stimuli under two stimulus-presentation arrangements:…

We used a script-fading package to teach children with autism to initiate social interactions across various activities in the school setting, and we programmed for generalization in the untrained home setting with a sibling. The three participants, ages 8 to 10 years, demonstrated deficits in social initiations with their peers. During baseline,…

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…

Successful conversation requires that the speaker's behavior is sensitive to nonvocal listener responses. We observed children with autism spectrum disorder during conversation probes in which a listener periodically displayed nonvocal cues that she was uninterested in the conversation. We used behavioral skills training to teach conversation…

We taught 2 children with visual impairments to select a coin from an array using tactile cues after hearing its name and then to select a coin after hearing its value. Following the acquisition of these listener (receptive language) skills, we then observed the emergence of speaker (expressive language) skills without direct instruction.…

This experiment investigated the combined use of visual prompts, daily feedback, and rewards to reduce electricity consumption in a university residential hall. After a 17-day baseline period, the experimental intervention was introduced in the intervention hall, and no change was made in the control hall. Energy usage decreased in the…

Bruxism, forceful grinding of one's teeth together, can produce destructive outcomes such as wear on the teeth and damaged gums and bone structures. The current study implemented a multicomponent intervention that consisted of vocal and physical cues to decrease rates of bruxism. A partial component analysis suggested that the vocal cue was only…

Participants were trained and tested to select stimuli of differing physical quantities in the presence of 2 color contextual cues for more than and less than. Following more than and less than relational training, participants allocated the majority of their responses to the slot machine that shared formal properties of color with the contextual…

Least-to-most prompting hierarchies (e.g., progressing from verbal to modeled to physical prompts until the target response occurs) may be ineffective when the prompts do not cue the individual to attend to the relevant stimulus dimensions. In such cases, emission of the target response persistently requires one or more of the higher level…

In the type of intraverbal that consists of saying the opposite of a word, two intraverbals are related to one another because the response form of each intraverbal functions as part of a discriminative stimulus for the other (e.g., "cold" in response to "name the opposite of hot," and vice versa). Moreover, the contextual cue "Name the opposite…

Following a pretest, 8 participants who were unfamiliar with algebraic and trigonometric functions received a brief presentation on the rectangular coordinate system. Next, they participated in a computer-interactive matching-to-sample procedure that trained formula-to-formula and formula-to-graph relations. Then, they were exposed to 40 novel…

The present experiment investigated the impact of contextually trained discriminations on gambling behavior. Nine recreational slot-machine players were initially exposed to concurrently available computerized slot machines that were each programmed on random-ratio schedules of reinforcement and differed only in color. All participants distributed…

The study investigated the effectiveness of using visual cues to highlight the seams of baseballs, to improve the hitting of curveballs by five undergraduate varsity baseball team candidates. Results indicated that subjects hit a greater percentage of marked than unmarked balls. (Author/DB)