Some individuals with intellectual disabilities do not respond to praise as a reinforcer, which may limit their ability to learn. We evaluated 2 procedures (stimulus pairing and response-stimulus pairing), both of which involved pairing previously neutral praise statements with preferred edible items, to determine their usefulness in establishing…

Action-outcome contingencies can be learnt either by active trial-and-error, or vicariously, by observing the outcomes of actions performed by others. The extant literature is ambiguous as to which of these modes of learning is more effective, as controlled comparisons of operant and observational learning are rare. Here, we contrasted human…

We conducted a modified paired-choice preference assessment and used a multielement design to examine the effects of noncontingent access to high- and low-preference music on vocal stereotypy exhibited by children with autism. For 3 of the 4 participants, high-preference music (a) produced lower levels of vocal stereotypy than low-preference music…

Presenting college students, in a wide variety of content areas, with frequent announced and unannounced quizzes appears to correlate positively with enhanced test performance. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine if similar results can be achieved with high school students in a standard economics class. Based on a theoretical…