Successive matching-to-sample (S-MTS) with a go/no-go response requirement has previously produced equivalence classes with nonverbal auditory stimuli among college students. When participants are required to talk aloud during posttests (protocol analysis), their verbal behavior tends to match their selection performance. However, in some cases,…

Instructive feedback is a procedure that introduces additional stimuli before or after a learning trial and can result in the acquisition of stimuli not directly taught. Further research may help us better understand the conditions under which instructive feedback is effective and preferred. In the present study, the experimenters…

With the rise of wearable technologies, mobile devices and artificial intelligence comes a growing pressure to understand downstream effects of cognitive offloading on children's future thinking and behavior. Here, we explored whether compelling children to use an indiscriminate cognitive offloading strategy affects their subsequent strategy…

Interest in science is critical for science learning. The family plays a major role in supporting the development of children's interest in science by eliciting and fostering interest and engagement with science content and practice. This study characterizes triggers for interest in science in everyday family life and measures the duration of…

This explorative qualitative study investigated how families engage in mealtime conversations supported with decorated plates that were specially designed to promote family conversations. Our aim was to examine the main thematic and discursive patterns that naturally occurred in these conversations. Six Norwegian families of pre-school children…

Music performance is an intensive sensorimotor task that involves the generation of mental representations of musical information that are actively accessed, maintained, and manipulated according to the demands of the performance. Internal representations and external information interact through feedback and feedforward processes that adjust the…

The autoclitic is among the least studied and most complex verbal operant named and described by Skinner. The descriptive autoclitic is one subtype, which among other functions can describe the strength of the response. If the clarity of the stimulus is one source of response strength for tacts, manipulating stimulus clarity should evoke different…

People can fail to notice objects and events in their visual environment when their attention is engaged elsewhere. This phenomenon is known as inattentional blindness, and its consequences can be costly for important real-world decisions. However, not noticing certain visual information could also signal expertise in a domain. In this study, we…

The inclusion of private events in the philosophy of our science is integral to avoid dualism and remain objective rather than making assumptions about an unseen mind. However, the inclusion of behaviors and stimuli which cannot be observed in an analysis poses obvious issues. One established method of studying covert behavior is to examine tasks…

Computational models of infant word-finding typically operate over transcriptions of infant-directed speech corpora. It is now possible to test models of word segmentation on speech materials, rather than transcriptions of speech. We propose that such modeling efforts be conducted over the speech of the experimental stimuli used in studies…

This study investigated how emotional valence of a perceived emotional state impacted performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task (RMET) in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing (TD) controls. Valence of items on the RMET, Adult (RMET-A) and Child (RMET-C) versions, was first classified in a survey of…

Previous studies have shown that fixations on familiar stimuli tend to be longer than on unfamiliar stimuli, theorized to be a result of retrieval of information from memory. We hypothesize that extended fixations are due to a lesser need to explore an already familiar stimulus. Participant's gaze was tracked as they tried to encode or retrieve a…

Older adults struggle with tasks requiring selective attention amidst distractions. Experimental observations about age-related decline have relied on visual search designs using static displays. However, natural environments often embed dynamic structures that afford proactive anticipation of task-relevant information. We investigate the capacity…

It is important for children to learn to identify safety stimuli in their environment; however, there has been limited research in the field of behavior analysis related to effective and efficient strategies for teaching these skills to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Although previous research has demonstrated the effectiveness of…

Purpose: During videofluoroscopic examination of swallowing, patients commonly are instructed to hold a bolus in their mouth until they hear a verbal instruction to swallow, which usually consists of the word "swallow" and is commonly referred to as the command swallow condition. The language-induced motor facilitation theory suggests…