Automaticity can be established by consistently reinforcing contingencies during practice. During reinforcement learning, however, new relations can also be derived, which were never directly reinforced. For instance, reinforcing the overlapping contingencies A [right arrow] B and A [right arrow] C, can lead to a new relation B-C, which was never…

Five individuals with autism or other developmental disabilities participated in paired-stimulus preference assessments during repeated baseline probes. All subjects initially showed a pronounced bias by typically selecting the stimulus placed in either the left or right position. Biased responding for 3 subjects was eliminated when training…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of PECS phase III application training on independent mands in young children with autism. Participants were five children with autism ranging from ages 2 to 4 years old. A multiple baseline across participants was used to evaluate acquisition of independent correct mands across baseline and…

A go/no-go procedure with compound stimuli typically establishes emergent behavior that parallels in structure and typical outcome that of conventional tests for symmetric, transitive, and equivalence relations in normally capable adults. The present study employed a go/no-go compound stimulus procedure with pigeons. During training, pecks to…

In 2 experiments, the interplay of action perception and action production was investigated in 6-month-old infants. In Experiment 1, infants received 2 versions of a means-end task in counterbalanced order. In the action perception version, a preferential looking paradigm in which infants were shown an actor performing means-end behavior with an…

The vigilance reinforcement hypothesis (VRH) asserts that errors in signal detection tasks are partially explained by operant reinforcement and extinction processes. VRH predictions were tested with a computerized baggage screening task. Our experiment evaluated the effects of signal schedule (extinction vs. variable interval 6 min) and visual…

In Experiment 1, "more" and "less" relations were trained for arbitrary Stimuli A1 and A2 with 3 children with autism. The following conditional discriminations were then trained: A1-B1, A2-B2, B1-C1, B2-C2. In subsequent tests, participants showed derived more-less mands (mand with C1 for more and mand with C2 for less). A training procedure…

Several types of contrast effects have been identified including incentive contrast, anticipatory contrast, and behavioral contrast. Clement, Feltus, Kaiser, and Zentall (2000) proposed a type of contrast that appears to be different from these others and called it within-trial contrast. In this form of contrast the relative value of a reinforcer…

Five experiments assessed associative symmetry in pigeons. In Experiments 1A, 1B and 2, pigeons learned two-alternative symbolic matching with identical sample- and comparison-response requirements and with matching stimuli appearing in all possible locations. Despite controlling for the nature of the functional stimuli and insuring all requisite…

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends vision screening of all children between 3 and 5 years of age, and states have mandated vision screening for all school children. Participants were three 4-6-year old school children with either a developmental delay or autism who scored "could not test" on the state required vision screening.…

In a first series of experiments, 9 groups of rats were exposed to 30 20-minute sessions of successive visual discrimination training ("go/no-go," or mult FR-1 ext), where components ([S.sup.D] and [S.sup.[DELTA]]) were equal (1 min) in length. Responses during [S.sup.D] were reinforced with a nonresetting delay (Experiment 1a) or a resetting…

We trained four pigeons to discriminate a Michotte launching animation from three other animations using a go/no-go task. The pigeons received food for pecking at one of the animations, but not for pecking at the others. The four animations featured two types of interactions among objects: causal (direct launching) and noncausal (delayed, distal,…

Three pigeons discriminated between two sample stimuli (intensities of red light). The difficulty of the discrimination was varied over four levels. At each level, the relative reinforcer magnitude for the two correct responses was varied across conditions, and the reinforcer rates were equal. Within levels, discriminability between the sample…

The present study examined how the magnitude of time-out duration following incorrect responses affected the ability of adults to learn simple visual discriminations. Sixty-four college students were randomly assigned to one of four groups that received a 0-, 5-, 10-, or 20-s time-out duration after an incorrect response. Each participant…