Association for Behavior Analysis International

This symposium involves studies investigating the effects of lag schedules and teacher presentation rates on academic, play, and social behavior of children with autism. The first presentation will discuss using a lag schedule to teach variable play behavior in preschoolers with autism, and assessing preference for variable or repetitive play. The second presentation will discuss using fixed and varied instructional arrangements to establish varied intraverbal responses. The third presentation will discuss the role of intertrial intervals of instruction presentation on skill acquisition and rates of problem behavior. The final presentation will discuss skill acquisition and problem behavior rates during two different intertrial intervals of instruction presentation, as well as student preference for instruction presentation rate. The discussant will provide comments on each of these studies.

BACBs, graduate students, researchers

Although individuals with autism tend to behave repetitively, certain reinforcement contingencies (e.g., lag schedules) can be used to increase and maintain behavioral variability. In a lag schedule, reinforcement is only delivered for responses that differ from recent responses. We designed the present study to promote variable play behavior in preschoolers with autism interacting with playsets and figurines, and to assess preference for variability and repetition contingencies. Limited data have shown a preference for variability in pigeons and college students, but this effect has not yet been explored in clinical populations. In this experiment, three preschoolers with autism were taught to discriminate between variability and repetition contingencies. With one set of discriminative stimuli, only play behaviors that met a lag schedule were reinforced, and with another, only repetitive play behaviors were reinforced. After differential performance was established, participants were presented with a choice between the two sets of stimuli, and participants completed a play session with the corresponding contingency. Two participants showed a slight preference for variability over repetition, and the other showed indifference. These results indicate that some individuals with autism play repetitively, not because they prefer repetitive play, but because they would require additional teaching to play variably.

Research on the importance of antecedent variables when teaching persons with autism has the potential to provide pragmatic methodologies for the applied setting. This study replicated and extended the work of Roxburgh and Carbone (2013) on the effects of the rate of teacher-presented instructional demands as an independent variable. An alternating treatment design was used to evaluate the effects of the rate of teacher presented instructional demands across three intertrial intervals (1 s, 5 s, 10 s). Dependent variables were frequency of problem behavior, frequency of teaching trials for target skills, frequency of error responses, frequency of mastered skills presented, and rates of reinforcement during discrete trial instruction with four students with autism. Results indicated that reduction of intertrial intervals resulted in a commensurate increase in rates of socially mediated positive reinforcement, increased rates of instructor presented teaching trials, and a decrease in frequency of problem behavior. Issues related to the importance of replication, the role of translational research in applied settings, and conceptual analyses of the role of motivating operation on the occurrence of problem behavior will also discussed.

This study was a partial replication and an extension of Roxburgh and Carbone (2012). The purpose of the study was three-fold. First, we evaluated the effects of varied teacher-presented instructional demands (inter trial interval = 1s, 5s) on the opportunities of respond, the number of responses emitted, percentage of correct responses, and percentage of intervals with disruptive behavior for three children with autism. Second, we compared the effects of varied teacher presentation rates on responding, especially the accuracy of responding and occurrences of disruptive behavior during easy and hard tasks. Third, we used a concurrent-chain procedure to assess participant preferences for teacher presentation rates during easy tasks. An alternating treatment embedded in ABAB without baseline design was used to compare the effects of the two treatment conditions (inter trial interval = 1s, 5s) and two task conditions (easy and hard). The results of the study demonstrated that as compared to extended intertrial interval (ITI), brief ITI increased the rate of instructional demands presented, rate of learner responses emitted, and rate of correct responding during both tasks while increasing percentage of correct responding and reducing problem behaviors during hard tasks only. During easy tasks, the participants’ choices between two rates were inconsistent, suggesting avoidance contingency might have been in effect.