Association for Behavior Analysis International

Both clinicians and applied researchers describe themselves as applied behavior analysts. This symposium includes three presentations that provide information and strategies that are relevant to both. The first presentation is on the use of praise in the demand condition of an FA, and examines its effect on escape as a reinforcer. The second examines a strategy to increase the range of preferred and reinforcing stimuli for children with autism. The third presents an alternative way to examine data that can both clarify results for researchers and provide useful information for clinicians.

Behavior analysts who work with children with disabilities including autism.

Autism Spectrum Disorder is a developmental disability characterized by social, behavioral, and communicative impairments. A primary characteristic of Autism includes restrictive and repetitive patterns of behavior. Because having few preferred items and activities can lead to educational, social, and communication barriers, it is important to identify additional preferred stimuli to incorporate into the individual’s environment. One way to identify potential reinforcers is via preference assessments. Although substantial literature exists on ways to identify preferred stimuli there may be occasions when those methods fail to identify a large variety of preferred items, or items that function as reinforcers . In these cases, another approach to increasing the variety and number of preferred and reinforcing stimuli may be to increase preference and reinforcer value for items that are readily available, but low preferred. One novel approach to doing this includes video modeling. The purpose of the current study was to assess effects of video modeling on preference and reinforcer value of previously low-preferred stimuli.

Recent studies have demonstrated the use of latency as an index of response strength in the assessment and treatment of behavior (e.g., Thomason-Sassi et al., 2011). However, latency-based single subject designs may be difficult to interpret given how latency values are depicted graphically. Although visual inspection is the primary method of analyzing single-case subject designs, previous studies have primarily focused on interrater agreement of rate or frequency as primary measures. An alternative method to depicting latency-based measures and instantaneous rate may be a useful tool for clinicians to interpret latency-based graphs and in comparing latency to non-latency-based graphs.