Association for Behavior Analysis International

Behavioral experiments that compare participants' performance of theoretically equivalent operants, whether to determine the effects of different treatments, or of other differences determined by the experiment's independent variable, must necessarily take into account the potentially confounding effect of operant bias: a consistent preference for one operant over another. During a series of studies involving human participants, persistent systematic operant biases were observed. These studies used two different types of operants, one of which required the participants to draw shapes on a computer graphics tablet; the observed biases were associated both with the hand motions involved in executing each operant (kinesthetic bias), and with the operants associated visual stimuli (perceptual bias). In some cases there was an interaction effect that combined the two biases. Other operants studied involved typing non-word sequences of letters on the computer keyboard. In those experiments, in addition to biases related to the specific letter patterns (verbal associations), an ergonomic analysis of the hand motions required to execute them revealed systematic and robust kinesthetic biases very similar to those found using the other operant type. These results have implications for any research involving operant behaviors with similar kinesthetic or perceptual aspects, particularly studies in which human participants work on a computer or tablet.

It is known that stimulus control requires more than the mere presence of stimuli signaling contingencies: the relation between the stimuli and the response is critical. Here we explore this biological constraint on learning with humans using an oculomotor learning paradigm called saccadic adaptation. The saccade target is surreptitiously displaced during the saccade to induce a position error that can increase or decrease saccade angles depending on the orientation of the target second step. Stimuli affecting the motor command (such as target direction as clockwise and counterclockwise) differentially control saccadic adaptation leading to two distinct and simultaneous distributions of saccades angle, but surprisingly purely visual cues fail to do so (e.g. target color or shape). We conducted three experiments, which consisted in adding a differently colored distractor to the target presentation. For the first time in twenty-five years of experimentation, we observed strong discriminative control of saccade adaptation. These results show that any stimuli could potentially control differentially saccadic adaptation provided that the relation between the stimuli and the saccadic response is made relevant. The functional significance of this control extends well beyond saccade adaptation and provides strong evidence for a SD-response relevance effect in humans.

Writing is a complex behavior for which children are often assessed on the quality of the grammar and the spelling instead of the content and the originality of the ideas they bring about in their text (Vargas, 2009). As a behavior, writing can be improved by applied behaviour analysis techniques. Yet, some measurement is necessary to enable the quantification of novelty and creativity. The purpose of this study is to present the Guay-Gauthier Grid (GGG) for the evaluation of creativity in writing exercises. The grid consist of a procedure appraising originality by identifying specific content in a writing exercise, one of Guilfords divergent thinking competencies. Two correctors evaluated two hundred and thirty students applying for an enriched high school program on the writing of a short text about a prescribed subject. The grid is construed to identify the twelve targeted contents for which a score is attributed based on the rarity of the content. Results show that the correctors had an inter-rater agreement of 88,61 % and that a majority of children scored low which is to be expected. Different ways to improve creative writing behavior using the grid procedure could be easily implemented in a classroom setting.