No abstract

Nine retarded or autistic persons exhibiting very serious self-injury were treated with several types of reinforcement procedures in a comparative study. During the baseline level of instructional prompting, self-injury occurred during 55% of the observation intervals, 57% during social extinction, 34% during differential reinforcement for non-self-injury (DRO), 28% during differential reinforcement of incompatible behavior (DRI), 25% during response interruption, and 6% during combined DRIInterruption. Extended application of the DRI-Interruption procedure in the ward and class situations showed a mean level of 12% self-injury on the first day'and 0-10% each month for durations up to 48 months while performed by the regular institutional staff. The DRI-Interruption procedure was more effective than the alternatives for most subjects and within 4% of the next most effective procedure for the others. The DRIInterruption procedure offers a training method that is fairly rapid, applicable to diverse and severe cases. substantial in the degree of benefit, enduring in effectiveness under extended maintenance, and more effective than the alternatives considered here. Its principal disadvantages appear to be the greater training time required as compared with physical punishment and the extensive manual contact required by the interruption component.

Vomiting of nonmedical origin by retarded persons has been found to be greatly influenced by reinforcement procedures. To explicate the possible influence of the rate and amount of food intake, a satiation procedure and a spaced-eating procedure were provided to three profoundly retarded adults with this problem. Vomiting was found to double or triple after satiation for each subject, and toaecrease during spaced eating for each subject; the decrease was especially great for the two subjects who learned to eat most slowly after extended spaced eating training. These results suggest that vomiting is caused in large part by excessive stomach loading and can be effectively treated by reducing the eating rate and/or amount of food intake. This generalization may also apply to infants and to the bulimic binge-purge cycle of nonretarded adults.

The present study reinforced the two instructors of two students with profound mental retardation first for the instructors' training behaviors, then for improved student learning in a multiple baseline across responses design. Reinforcement of the instructors' training behaviors increased their training behaviors, replicating the findings of previous studies, but had no effect on student learning. When the reinforcement for the instructors was instead made contingent upon student learning, the student learning improved and the instructors' lllgh level of training behaviors was maintained. In addition, the instructors began to request training for themselves. These findings suggest that staff motivation programs for instructors might usefully base the reinforcers not only on the instructor's performance, but on the progress of their students.Since persons with severe or profound mental retardation require intensive care and training, behavioral staff motivation programs have been developed for improving the performance of their caretakers and trainers. A variety of specified reinforcers for these employees have been used effectively in these staff motivation programs such as trading stamps