Association for Behavior Analysis International

Behavior analysis has a long tradition of applying behavior interventions for people with autism and other developmental disabilities. According to the Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB, 2022), most certified behavior analysts focus primarily on the delivery of services to this population. We recognize the vast specializations in our science that are known and are yet to be identified. This symposium aims to discuss behavior-analytic applications in other fields and with different populations. In the first talk, Dr. Abigail Kennedy will discuss behavioral pediatrics in an integrated primary care setting. The second presentation will feature Dr. Andresa De Souza, who will present the applications of the science of human behavior in higher education and college training. Next, Nicole Pfaller-Sadovsky will review the use of behavior-analytic principles to help change undesired canine behavior by simultaneously improving human-dog interactions and welfare. Finally, Dr. Maegan Pisman will introduce the key concepts from the user-experience (UX) research industry and describe how they do or do not align with behavior-analytic research. Dr. Darlene Crone-Todd will serve as the discussant.

No prerequisite skills are necessary.

The contributions of behavior analysis to education were potentially one of its first applications toward socially-significant issues. Skinner laid out the foundation for the behavioral conceptualization of learning and effective teaching with the knowledge prevenient from the experimental analysis of behavior. Two important technologies of teaching product of the experimental analysis of behavior and Skinner’s approach to teaching were the teaching machine and programmed instruction (PI; Skinner, 1965). Skinner’s work set the stage for other “big ideas” in the field of higher education and teaching technologies, including Keller’s Personalized System of Instruction (PSI), precision teaching, interteaching, and computer-aided personalized system of instruction (CAPSI). Collectively, these teaching approaches represent a landmark for the contributions of behavior analysis in higher education. This talk will start with a historical account of the creation of Skinner’s teaching machines and the development of PI as a foundation for effective teaching technologies. It will present the main components of PI and the available empirical support for its applications in higher education instruction. Finally, it will describe the main characteristics of behavior-analytical approaches in education and discuss future directions for the field.

Intermittent schedules of reinforcement are frequently used in dog training. In the present study, additional to a 15-s fixed-time schedule (FT 15s), six dogs were exposed to fixed-interval 15s (FI 15s), a combination of FT 15s and FI 15s, and an extinction-only condition (no reinforcement was delivered). While the effectiveness of these interventions has been shown with human and animal learners, little is known about the emotional behavior that is related to these contingencies. We found that rates of emotional responses (e.g., lip/nose licking, vocalizing) varied in prevalence across dogs and phases. Although lip/nose licking was displayed in high rates across all dogs and phases, it was generally lower in baseline and extinction phases; this suggests that frustration was lower in these phases. The effect size calculations for dogs engaging in pacing, sneezing, and vocalizing, underscored the varied prevalence of the behaviors across phases and dogs, and yielded mostly small- to medium-size effects. These results are especially relevant for the training of companion and working dogs and their well-being during training sessions. Future research should continue investigating emotional behavior in dogs across various schedules of reinforcement (e.g., variable schedules).