Operant discrimination training to establish praise as a reinforcer

Abstract

Social deficits are a hallmark feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Consequently, socially mediated consequences (i.e., praise) may not function as reinforcers for individuals with ASD. Given the frequency in which praise is used as a programmed consequence in empirical research and in clinical practice, it is necessary to explore procedures that could condition praise to function as reinforcers. Operant discrimination training has emerged as a potential procedure to condition stimuli to acquire reinforcing properties. This study aimed to utilize the operant discrimination training procedure to condition a praise statement to function as a reinforcer. Four children diagnosed with ASD participated in the study. A nonconcurrent multiple baseline design across participants was used to evaluate this emerging pairing procedure. Findings suggest that immediate effects were observed across all participants, but responding did not maintain, suggesting that reinforcing value of the praise statement diminished.

A systematic review of behaviour analytic processes and procedures for conditioning reinforcers among individuals with autism, developmental or intellectual disability

“…Four ODT studies described operant discrimination training procedures in which the child was taught to emit an arbitrary response that was either easy (e.g., reaching for an edible; Lugo et al, 2017), new, or low in frequency (Taylor-Santa et al, 2014) and under the discriminative control of the previously neutral stimulus. In fact, the defining part of the ODT procedure was that the reinforced arbitrary response was emitted in the presence of a neutral (to be conditioned) stimulus that acquired discriminative properties during the training.…”

“…Therefore, the procedure was judged efficacious in conditioning neutral stimuli as reinforcers through the establishment of the stimulus itself as discriminative for responding. Taylor-Santa et al 2014, as well as Lugo et al (2017) proceeded to directly test the acquired reinforcing value of the stimulus on the participants' behaviour, while the outcome measures in Carbone et al (2013) comprised the clinical relevance of the increase in mands with eye contact only, and Isaksen and Holth (2009) focused solely on joint attention responses (Table 2).…”

“…-stimulus pairing Also called traditional procedure(Lugo et al, 2017) or response independent pairing (RIP) inLepper and Petursdottir (2017).Procedural variations in terms of stimuli characteristics and number of presentations. In RIP the pairings are time-based and do not depend on any behaviour of the subject.…”

Procedimentos para condicionar reforçadores para pessoas com TEA: revisão de literatura

“…O procedimento de discriminação simples foi, por sua vez, a estratégia menos utilizada (descrita em sois estudos). Sendo que uma das pesquisas (Lugo et al, 2017) que utilizou esse procedimento é bem recente, apontando para o fato de que os pesquisadores podem estar tentando encontrar novos procedimentos para condicionar novos reforçadores para essa população, indo além dos procedimentos respondentes.…”

“…Além do emparelhamento, alguns pesquisadores (Leaf et al, 2016;Lugo et al, 2017;Moher et al, 2008;Singer-Dudek e Oblak, 2013;Taylor-Santa et al, 2014) estão utilizando outras estratégias para condicionar reforçadores para pessoas com TEA, como por exemplo observação e discriminação simples. Dessa forma, com a finalidade de sistematizar os tipos de procedimentos atuais utilizados para criar novos reforçadores para essa população, o objetivo desse estudo é fazer uma revisão bibliográfica de pesquisas que investigaram procedimentos para condicionar reforçadores para pessoas com TEA.…”