Sensitivity to reinforcement contingencies was examined in six individuals with mental retardation using a concurrent operants procedure in the context of a computer game. Results included individual differences in sensitivity and differential sensitivity to rate and magnitude variation. Results suggest that comprehensive assessments of potential…

Examines renovation issues involving 30- and 40-year-old school facilities. Explores ways a school district can renovate old buildings to first-class cost-effective facilities while avoiding excessive transition costs. Discussions include installation of new technology and the resulting wiring demands, and developing more energy-efficient heating…

Effects of prior exposure to the experimental chamber with levers present or absent and variable-time (VT) 60-s water deliveries arranged during one, five, or no 1-hr sessions were examined in rats during a 6-hr response-acquisition session in which presses on one lever produced water delivery immediately or after a 15-s resetting delay, and…

A within-participant comparison of simple-to-complex, complex-to-simple, and simultaneous protocols was conducted establishing different sets of three 7-member equivalence classes for 4 undergraduate students. The protocols were implemented under either accuracy-only or accuracy-plus-speed conditions while keeping number of presentations of…

In autoshaping experiments, we quantified the acquisition of anticipatory head poking in individual mice, using an algorithm that finds changes in the slope of a cumulative record. In most mice, upward changes in the amount of anticipatory poking per trial were abrupt, and tended to occur at session boundaries, suggesting that the session is as…

Mand functions for two stimuli (A1 and A2) were trained for 3 children with autism and were then incorporated into two related conditional discriminations (A1-B1/A2 -B2 and B1-C1/B2-C2). Tests were conducted to probe for a derived transfer of mand response functions from Al and A2 to C1 and C2, respectively. When 1 participant failed to…

This project examined whether a history of reinforced relational responding would result in derived requesting skills in 3 adults with disabilities. Participants were first taught to request preferred items using pictures; they were then taught conditional discriminations between pictures and their dictated names and between dictated names and…

The authors review the literature on the 2 main models of the placebo effect: expectancy theory and classical conditioning. A path is suggested to dissolving the theoretical impasse that has long plagued this issue. The key is to make a clear distinction between 2 questions: What factors shape placebo effects? and What learning mediates the…

Findings obtained by providing rats with a single fixed series of events, A-B-C-..., often are equally compatible with three alternative serial learning interpretations: that the signal for items is (A) their position in the series (position view), (B) the prior item of the series (chaining view), and (C) one, two, or more prior items of the…

Five children with autism were taught to match printed words to corresponding pictures. Participants' speed of learning was compared across three training conditions, each involving a 5-s delay of reinforcement, using a within-participants alternating treatments design. In the cue-value condition, a verbal phrase of approval (e.g., "good!") was…

Three masked-prime naming experiments were conducted to examine the impact of morpheme boundaries on letter transposition confusability effects. In Experiment 1, the priming effects of primes containing letter transpositions within (sunhsine) and transpositions across (susnhine) the constituents of compound words were compared with correctly…

Joint attention, a synchronizing of the attention of two or more persons, has been an increasing focus of research in cognitive developmental psychology. Research in this area has progressed mainly outside of behavior analysis, and behavior-analytic research and theory has tended to ignore the work on joint attention. It is argued here, on the one…

In four conditioned taste aversion experiments with rats as subjects, the effects of extinguished or pre-exposed flavors on retardation and summation tests was compared. Experiment 1 showed that when steps were taken to ensure similar exposure to the target flavor in all conditions, acquisition after pre-exposure and reacquisition after extinction…

Animals recognize a taste cue as aversive when it has been associated with post-ingestive malaise; this associative learning is known as conditioned taste aversion (CTA). When an animal consumes a new taste and no negative consequences follow, it becomes recognized as a safe signal, leading to an increase in its consumption in subsequent…

Targeted mutagenesis in mice has shown that genes from a wide variety of gene families are involved in memory formation. The efficient identification of genes involved in learning and memory could be achieved by random mutagenesis combined with high-throughput phenotyping. Here, we provide the first report of a mutagenesis screen that has…