While interest in active avoidance has recently been resurgent, many concerns relating to the nature of this form of learning remain unresolved. By separating stimulus and response acquisition, aversive Pavlovian-instrumental transfer can be used to measure the effect of avoidance learning on threat processing with more control than typical…

We used a contingent acoustical feedback procedure to increase appropriate walking and decrease toe walking exhibited by a young boy with autism. After a pre-treatment screening assessment suggested that toe walking was maintained by automatic reinforcement, we paired an auditory stimulus (i.e., a clicking sound) with access to a preferred item to…

Five reinforcing activities were presented to and interrupted for two participants with autism. An errorless teaching procedure was then introduced with two similar activities prompting the participants to request information saying "How?" in order to resume the activity. The dependent variable included both the cumulative number of…

Previous attempts at lie detection, such as the polygraph, have relied on physiological arousal to identify deception--but these responses have not proven to be as reliable as is necessary for widespread use. Conditioning procedures have been shown to increase the discriminative physiological arousal exhibited during deception, but have targeted…

Rabbits were classically conditioned using compounds of tone and light conditioned stimuli (CSs) presented with either simultaneous onsets (Experiment 1) or serial onsets (Experiment 2) in a delay conditioning paradigm. Training with the simultaneous compound reduced the likelihood of a conditioned response (CR) to the individual CSs ("mutual…

Experience-induced changes associated with odor learning are mediated by a number of signaling molecules, including nitric oxide (NO), which is predominantly synthesized by neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) in the brain. In the current study, we investigated the role of nNOS in the acquisition and retention of conditioned olfactory fear. Mice…

We examined a procedure consisting of a preference assessment, prompting, contrived conditioned establishing operations, and consequences for correct and incorrect responses for teaching children with autism to mand "which?" We used a modified multiple baseline design across 3 participants. All the children learned to mand "which?" Generalization…

According to the retrieved context theory of episodic memory, the cue for recall of an item is a weighted sum of recently activated cognitive states, including previously recalled and studied items as well as their associations. We show that this theory predicts there should be compound cuing in free recall. Specifically, the temporal contiguity…

A modified multiple-baseline design across participants was used to evaluate a procedure for teaching the mand "Where?" to 3 children with autism. The participants were 3 and 5 years old and were participating in an intensive applied behavior analysis program. The participants were able to mand for items they wanted when the items were not in…

Pigeons were trained on many-to-one matching in which pairs of samples, each consisting of a visual stimulus and a distinctive pattern of center-key responding, occasioned the same reinforced comparison choice. Acquired equivalence between the visual and response samples then was evaluated by reinforcing new comparison choices to one set of…

Across three experiments, the transformation of consequential functions in accordance with a seven-member relational network (A-B-C-D-E-F-G) was investigated. In this network, the relational rankings ranged from A, ranked the least, to G, ranked the most. In the first phase, contextual cues for more-than and less-than were established by training…

Four young adults with moderate mental retardation were taught to include "please" as part of requests, and four environmental stimuli present during training were assessed. Results indicated that presence of a single stimulus or pair of stimuli increased the probability of the "please" response, whereas presence of other…

The use of operant procedures was extended to decrease immediate echolalia and increase appropriate responding to questions of a 21-year-old autistic man. Multiple baseline designs demonstrated that echolalia was rapidly replaced with correct stimulus-specific responses. A variety of generalized improvements were observed in verbal responses to…