Generalization of negatively reinforced mands in children with autism

Abstract

Each day, people encounter stimuli they find unpleasant. Some children with autism may require systematic instruction to acquire the communication skills necessary to request the termination of such aversive stimuli. We taught 2 school-aged boys with autism a mand (e.g., signing "stop") that could be used to escape a variety of aversive stimuli. First, we employed a systematic assessment to identify aversive stimuli to use during training. We then conducted mand training sequentially across those stimuli until sufficient exemplars were trained for generalization to occur to untrained stimuli. For both participants, cross-stimulus generalization was observed after training with 2 stimuli. Participants manded for escape in the presence of aversive stimuli, but almost never manded in the presence of preferred stimuli or when the programmed stimuli were absent. In addition, we found an inverse relation between acquisition of the mand and engagement in problem behavior and evidence of generalization to nontraining contexts.

Negatively-Reinforced Mands

“…This finding is consistent with previous studies demonstrating that negatively-reinforced mands can generalize to untrained stimuli (Groskreutz et al, 2014;Yi et al, 2006). Moreover, it provides supporting evidence that for the two children with ASD included in this study, the newly acquired mands generalized as a result of mand training without additional programming.…”

“…One aspect pertains to the manding function targeted during training. Although the manding function of escaping or avoiding nonpreferred or aversive stimuli is one of the first communicative functions to emerge in children (Carpenter, Mastergeorge, & Coggins, 1983), a limited number of investigators have addressed the topic of teaching negatively-reinforced mands to escape to children with ASD (Dyer & Kohland, 1991;Frost & Bondy, 2002;Groskreutz et al, 2014;Yi et al, 2006). The participants in the studies above were children with autism between the at LAURENTIAN UNIV LIBRARY on June 5, 2016 bmo.sagepub.com Downloaded from ages of 4 and 9 years.…”

“…Generalization of negatively-reinforced mands has been examined by a limited number of researchers (Groskreutz et al, 2014;Yi et al, 2006). The researchers in these studies used a generalization-promoting at LAURENTIAN UNIV LIBRARY on June 5, 2016 bmo.sagepub.com Downloaded from strategy (i.e., multiple exemplars) to facilitate manding in the presence of untrained nonpreferred items or across settings.…”

On the Distinction Between the Motivating Operation and Setting Event Concepts

“…This functional approach is consistent with the goal of radical behaviorism, which is the prediction and control of behavior (Skinner, 1953). The aforementioned conceptualization by Groskreutz et al (2014) of task aversiveness as an MO (specifically an EO) illustrates the functional nature of the concept's definition because the experimental preparation was able to demonstrate, at a minimum, the value-altering effect of task aversiveness on escape as a negative reinforcer. Interestingly, task aversiveness can also be described as a setting event because it meets the concept's lesser requirement of a demonstrated relation to behavior.…”

“…1 A contemporary example of the use of the MO concept is illustrated by Groskreutz et al (2014) who taught children how to request that an aversive activity be terminated (i.e., negatively reinforced mands). The authors demonstrated that such responses were rarely emitted in the absence of aversive stimuli or in the presence of preferred stimuli, even when activity escape was available as a consequence.…”