Rodriguez et al. (2022) discovered that teaching four component skills was sufficient to facilitate the emergence of intraverbal tacts across four applications with three participants. Our study replicated and evaluated an extension of this procedure that was directed at facilitating intraverbal tacts when a child learns the component skills but…

Children with autism spectrum disorder often exhibit difficulties in social communication and interaction. Those who do not acquire functional communication to effectively express wants and needs often are at a higher risk of displaying challenging behaviors. Mand training is recognized as an evidence-based intervention for teaching communication…

The use of autoclitics can influence the behavior of individuals making choices when responding to a survey (e.g., checking or unchecking a box). In two studies, we investigated the effects of autoclitics as "nudges" on choice by manipulating different frames (opt-in and opt-out) and default options (i.e., unchecked and checked boxes).…

This study investigates crossmodal fear generalization, testing whether conditioned fear spreads between different sensory modalities. Participants in the unimodal group were presented with visual stimuli--images of a sparrow (CS+) and a laptop (CS-)--while the crossmodal group received auditory stimuli--sparrow calls (CS+) and keyboard typing…

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)…

A growing body of literature supports the use of echoic prompts toward conditioning other functional language skills. However, many individuals with autism spectrum disorder do not emit echoic behavior. Identifying the prerequisite skills of an echoic repertoire may be beneficial for intervention planning and clinical decision making. A chart…

Repetitive verbal behavior presents a unique challenge to researchers and clinicians as the topography of the behavior often appears to be a mand for information or tangibles; however, the repetitive nature of the behavior indicates otherwise. The purpose of the current study was to (a) extend the application of functional analysis (FA)…

Conditioned reinforcers are widely used in applied behavior analysis. Basic research evidence reveals that Pavlovian learning plays an important role in the acquisition and efficacy of new conditioned-reinforcer functions. Thus, a better understanding of Pavlovian principles holds the promise of improving the efficacy of conditioned reinforcement…

In the field of stimulus generalization, an old yet unresolved discussion pertains to what extent stimulus misidentifications contribute to the pattern of conditioned responding. In this article, we perform cluster analysis on six datasets (four published datasets and two unpublished datasets, included N = 950) to examine the relationship between…

Pavlovian fear conditioning is a widely used behavioral paradigm for studying associative learning in rodents. Despite early recognition that subjects may engage in a variety of both conditioned and unconditioned responses, the last several decades have seen the field narrow its focus to measure freezing as the sole indicator of conditioned fear.…

Bernard Stiegler diagnoses that we live in societies of control under an aesthetic conditioning. Marketing emerges as the foundational force in societies of control, adept at shaping individual desires and cultivating them into consumerism. Capturing our attention, particularly through audiovisual mediums, dictates our behaviour. In essence, the…

This article explores bells, and objects in general, from a philosophical perspective. More specifically, it explores the way objects orient our being, but only partially as aspects of things always remain withdrawn from access. Through an exploration of the elemental forms of bells, this article positions object exploration as a wholly spiritual…

Teachers need knowledge about operant conditioning as an important way to prevent student misbehavior. In an experiment with 181 student teachers, we investigated how the acquisition of conceptual knowledge about operant conditioning can be promoted through case comparisons. Our results showed that case comparison effectively supported the…

Instruction in auditory-visual conditional discriminations for young children with autism spectrum disorder is typically based on either a conditional-only or a simple-conditional method. In this study, we evaluated a modified simple-conditional method in which we removed the steps for which visual comparisons were presented in isolation. We…

Functional communication training (FCT; Carr & Durand, 1985) is frequently utilized as a treatment for socially maintained problem behavior (Tiger et al., 2008). Although FCT is a viable treatment option for the reduction of problem behavior, researchers have identified several variables related to the selection of the functional communication…