Association for Behavior Analysis International

Culturo-Behavioral Science is a nascent, and ambitious subarea of behavior analysis, combining known elements of behavior analysis with new concepts (like the metacontingency, cultural cusps, and culturo-behavioral hypercycles) developed from interdisciplinary interactions with other fields, including biology, anthropology, and systems theory, that similarly emphasize functional interactions between constituents over time. While culturo-behavioral science has expressed intentions of addressing the most difficult problems of culture and society with the power of behavior analysis, there is still much work to be done before this goal may be achieved. In this symposium, four papers will present insights derived from theoretical considerations and case study analysis of cultural phenomena, as well as discuss recommendations and challenges facing researchers and practitioners as they study culturo-behavioral phenomena and seek to implement culturo-behavioral interventions in both formal organizations and in society at-large.

Organizations are made of interacting behaviors, which makes them contingencies for the shaping, maintaining and changing of behavior. Implementing new practices, whether technological or social innovations, requires a thorough analysis of the contingencies maintaining the currently prevalent behavior. Successful implementation of new cultural practices does not rest on the inherent novelty or quality of the innovation itself. It depends on how these practices are functionally related to the environment. Rather, success comes from the members of the organization coming into contact with reinforcers for the new practices, while contingencies maintaining the practices to be replaced are changed, from reinforcement to extinction. The processes which are embedded in the functional relations and the structures in which these interactions are framed are critical to implementation. Behavior analysis offers important contributions to implementation theory and practice if communicated in a way that makes it the preferred option.

Developmental theory is the foundation for how child development is predominately understood by our science as well as our society. This is of special significance for practitioners, as these sets of assumptions impact treatment decision-making. However, developmental theories from mainstream developmental psychology and behavior science are separate and distinct. Yet, an incomplete understanding of these theories may lead to misconceptions on the developmental process, which, in turn, may influence expectations on what are perceived to be reasonable standards in development. This paper will provide a review of dominant theories from mainstream developmental psychology and behavior science, and delineate between developmental milestones, stages, and cusps. The implications of conflicting theories and how they affect societal expectations for the child-caregiver dyad will be examined. Considerations for practitioners on how these theories impact decision-making on when and how certain developmental goals are met will be discussed.

Accounting for the participating variables present during an abusive episode featuring infant crying will lead to a richer understanding of the event and, therefore, will better inform prevention work. As a social event, abusive episodes necessitate at least two individuals, and thus requires a multi-perspective analysis. As an episode typically taking place during early infancy, infant abusive head trauma related to crying must account for individual biology, psychological history, current stimulus and response functions, and social history with respect to each other. Kantor’s field theory approach to behavior, interbehaviorism, considers such factors as participatory in the event. In this talk, I will lay out an initial sketch of potential participatory factors that will likely need exploration in building an account of the abusive episode. In doing so, attention will be given to connecting these elements to prevention work.

One of the most common concerns expressed by caregivers of children diagnosed with autism is related to challenges in the development of communication skills. Often children with autism require specialized intervention to promote language and communication skills. The current study examined the efficacy of Direct Instruction Language for Learning (DI-LL) in preschool and young school age children diagnosed with autism who also exhibited moderate language difficulties. DI-LL is a highly structured, commercially available curriculum designed to target expressive and receptive language abilities. This study included 83 participants who were randomized to receive 6 months of DI-LL or Treatment as Usual (TAU). The intervention was delivered twice per week for approximately 90 minutes per session. Using the Clinical Global Impressions-Improvements (CGI-I) scale, 54.8% of children who received DI-LL were rated as “much improved” or “very much improved” compared to only 21.9% of children randomized to TAU. Further, 55.5% of children who received the intervention achieved a clinically meaningful improvement on the standardized language measure compared to only 29.3% of those in the TAU condition. Overall, these results suggest that the Language for Learning program is an effective intervention to promote language skills in young children with autism.

A growing body of literature supports the efficacy of Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions (NDBIs) for treating young children with autism. Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT) is one such intervention which places specific emphasis on child motivation and has demonstrated effectiveness in improving functional and social communication skills (Koegel and Koegel 2019). The current symposium illustrates recent research evaluating factors that may impact treatment responses in populations of young children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, including parent involvement, treatment setting, intensity, duration and modalities of treatment delivery. The first study describes outcomes of a parent-training and clinician delivered PRT treatment package. The second study describes delivery of a similar PRT parent-training model via telehealth. The third study presents data from a randomized control trial of PRT parent training delivered via telehealth. Finally, the fourth study evaluates outcomes for a group of children in an intensive center-based PRT program. Findings from these studies have potential impact on understanding factors to optimize the delivery of PRT and improve access to evidence-based treatment.

Many children with autism struggle to acquire fluent verbal communication skills in spite of early behavioral intervention. Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT) employs maintenance tasks and reinforcement of child attempts to motivate children to initiate communication, and may have promise for rapidly increasing independent utterances. This presentation explores the short-term benefits and geralizability of clinician-delivered, center-based PRT on the acquisition of vocal communication skills. To date, twenty-six autistic children with significant language delays between 2 and 5 years have been randomly assigned to a center-based early intervention PRT program (n = 12) or the delayed treatment group (DTG; n = 14). Available pilot data from 10-minute video samples for the first three participants indicate rapid increase in number of words used during session probes over the course of treatment (Figure 1). Data analysis will continue for the remaining participants using available 10-minute video samples to assess the frequency of child-initiated utterances pre- and post-treatment. Interobserver agreement will be assessed for 30% of the videos and coders will meet an 80% reliability standard. Implications of the findings, as well as limitations, will be discussed with emphasis on the potential utility of PRT for motivating children with ASD to speak more independently.

The United States has the highest per capita healthcare spending in the world, but some of the worst healthcare outcomes. The US lags behind other similarly developed countries with regard to life expectancy and preventable deaths in spite of US healthcare costs being nearly twice that of comparable countries. A major factor that could be responsible for this are the upfront costs of healthcare access being placed on the individual in forms of private insurance, co-pays, and deductibles, thus deterring healthcare utilization. Three experiments using crowdsourced samples (Amazon Mechanical Turk, 200 per experiment) were conducted to examine how hypothetical healthcare seeking for three common symptoms (headache, nausea, and cough) was affected by duration of symptoms, severity of symptoms, and cost to access healthcare. Decision-making generally followed a hyperbolic form, while increased costs of healthcare resulted in significant delays of access to healthcare regardless of symptom severity. Shallower delay discounting was positively associated with physical health, while steeper delay discounting was positively associated with earlier treatment seeking. The results of these experiments can provide insight into health decision-making and help inform areas of policy reform to improve health outcomes in the US.

There has been a long standing call for the application of applied behavior analysis to problems of social importance. Applied behavior analysis practitioners are encouraged to provide socially valid care and to affect meaningful change. To do so, a practitioner must first identify meaningful goals and then teach them. This symposium will include a discussion on the evaluation of a training package designed to teach practitioners of behavior analysis to write meaningful goals. The presentation will also discuss strategies for teaching meaningful goals related to bullying and sexuality education to adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). An overview of goal selection, teaching procedures, and effectiveness of teaching will be discussed. This symposium will also include recommendations for future directions for the goals of ABA as pertaining to meaningful programming.

The audience should include practicing behavior analysts or behavior analysts in training (BCBA, BCaBA), looking either to refine practice skills or prepare to utilize best practices after becoming certified. Prerequisite skills should include an understanding of basic behavior analytic principles, experience working with adolescents with an autism spectrum disorder or another developmental or intellectual disability, and preferably experience writing skill acquisition goals and developing programming for these clients. The presentations in this symposium will enhance practice abilities for those working with and writing goals for these populations within the context of a behavior analytic lens.

While the field of applied behavior analysis is in a position to affect meaningful change in the outcomes of clients on the autism spectrum, it is currently coming short of doing so. This presentation will show that while research exists for teaching how to write goals structurally, there is a gap in the literature for teaching practitioners how to write goals that are meaningful and impact adult outcomes. Data will be presented from a treatment package aimed at guiding the goal writing of behavior analyst practitioners to help increase the inclusion of goals that are meaningful, socially valid, and highly individualized in order to positively impact the trajectory of a client with autism.

Adolescents diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) commonly display deficits with social communication, including difficulties with communicating their thoughts and feelings, advocating, and resolving conflict. These deficits make it difficult for adolescents with ASD to effectively respond to bullying, which places them at a significantly increased risk of being bullied than that of typically developing peers. This increased risk indicates the importance of remediating social skills deficits correlated with an increased risk of bullying. One intervention shown to effectively increase social skills for adolescents with ASD is the Teaching Interaction Procedure (TIP). This presentation will review the effectiveness of the TIP for teaching three adolescents diagnosed with ASD to emit a chain of social responses in response to being bullied.

Sexuality education is extremely important for persons with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). While there is much research supporting the need for sexuality education for people with autism, there is little experimental demonstration of teaching about sexuality for this population. This presentation will review a study which used an adapted alternating treatment design with control to evaluate two teaching methods (discrete trial teaching and behavioural skills training) to teach three children with autism two component skills related to sexuality safety. An in-situ probe was used to assess demonstration of skill in a natural environment setting. While all participants acquired both skills in teaching settings, in either teaching modality, in-situ probes of skill were demonstrated with variability and inconsistency for all participants. Future directions related to in-situ responding, as well as teaching component sexuality skills are suggested.

There are a number of assessments and interventions that are utilized to improve performance in organizations. However, how and when to use these assessments and interventions requires further research. The current symposium looks at several studies aimed at optimizing employee performance, that is, knowing what to intervene on, in what way, and at what organizational level to make the best use of resources. The first two studies will focus on treatment integrity – first at the performer level and second at the systems level. We will provide data on how procedural errors impact treatment integrity and discuss how analyzing them at the systems (organizational) level informs intervention. The second two studies will then highlight how we can utilize untapped resources and customize multi-component interventions. Specifically, we will present research on using co-worker communication to motivate employee performance and how priority weighting and goal difficulty affects behavior and results on performance scorecards. Implications for how these findings can influence decisions and interventions organization-wide will then be discussed. Overall, these studies will highlight how data can be utilized to enhance employee behavior and provide guidance to organizations on how to select and customize interventions for optimal employee performance.

Intermediate – Background and/or education in ABA, familiar with single-subject and group design research methodology, understanding of rule-governed behavior

Procedural integrity is the extent to which an intervention is implemented as designed (Gresham, 2004). Research shows that integrity impacts clinical outcomes (e.g., DiGennaro et al., 2005; Gresham et al., 1993). That is, higher clinical outcomes are associated with higher levels of integrity. Supervisors are tasked with the responsibility to collect integrity data on their team’s performance, as required by the board (BACB, 2020). However, it is unknown how these data are collected, or what analysis and subsequent action supervisors or organizational leaders take once the data are collected. With the permission of our customers, deidentified integrity data were aggregated and analyzed across a few hundred employees. All data were collected electronically and aggregated to display performance over time. Based on these data, suggestions for subsequent supervisor and organization-wide action are provided to improve their organization-wide and team’s performance, and ultimately impact clinical outcomes. We posit that organizations must use their integrity data to guide their individual, team, and organization-wide supervision efforts. The benefits of aggregating and analyzing integrity data, as well as recommendations for what supervisors should do with those data are discussed.

Recent research suggests that statements by supervisors may function as verbal motivating operations and alter employee performance, but it is unknown if similar effects would be seen if delivered by another source. The supervisor is usually the primary agent of change in performance management practices. However, given the numerous job responsibilities of a supervisor, it would be beneficial to examine the potential effects of interventions delivered by a source other than the supervisor, such as a co-worker. The current study used an analogue work setting with a simulated new hire orientation, a confederate supervisor and co-worker, and concurrently available work tasks. There were 10 participants and a single-subject, counterbalanced reversal design was used to investigate the effects of alternative sources of rule statement delivery on employee performance. Despite some mixed results, overall findings support the performance-enhancing effects of motivational statements. Additionally, responding to the different sources delivering the motivational statements (i.e., co-worker versus supervisor) was comparable and suggests the source of rule delivery in organizations may not matter. As such, it is possible that motivational statements delivered by co-workers is a viable, cost-effective way to motivate employee performance, though additional research is needed to confirm these findings.

The field of Organization Behavior Management (OBM) frequently utilizes multi-component interventions, one of which is the performance scorecard. The performance scorecard combines elements such as goal setting, feedback and reinforcement to increase 3-5 behaviors or results. In addition, these behaviors/results are weighted so that some types of performance receive more credit than others. It has been suggested that this is beneficial and communicates relative priorities to employees, but how this affects performance has yet to be empirically tested. Therefore, the present study investigated manipulation of priority weighting and the effect on performance on concurrently available tasks in a workplace analogue. The study included five participants and utilized a single-subject multiple baseline and reversal design to compare equally-weighted and priority-weighted scorecards. Overall, there was an increase in performance when a scorecard was introduced relative to baseline (no scorecard condition). Results also suggested that priority weighting had some influence on behavior, including increases in behavior weighted more heavily but also decreases in behaviors weighted less heavily. However, additional variables such as goal difficulty and task preference, also influenced the effects of the priority weights and deserve further consideration.

Although guidance has been provided to ensure willingness to participate in programs/treatment, or assent, a clear definition to govern observation and data based decisions is needed. A concept analysis (c.f. abstract tact, Skinner, 1957) is utilized to functionally define the critical features of assent thereby providing practitioners and researchers common ground on which to build methodology. By providing a comprehensive definition, assent can be obtained in many instances via conducive program arrangements (e.g., conjugate reinforcement, shaping, and composite repertoires). Additionally, there are instances when assent may be withdrawn. In this scenario, clinicians either honor the withdrawal of assent, or override it. Considerations for why it would be appropriate to continue treatment without assent or following the withdrawal of assent will be reviewed. A preliminary decision model consisting of different contextual variables for consideration will be reviewed.

Dogs have been trained for lung cancer detection, but the methods and results have varied widely. We aimed to clarify dogs’ capacity to detect lung cancer under operationally viable conditions. Using an automated apparatus, we trained dogs to indicate the presence of breath samples from individuals with lung cancer. We then conducted a blind test by interspersing samples of unknown status among samples with known status so that correct indications could be reinforced intermittently. Despite efforts to make blind samples indistinguishable from training samples, we observed a significant bias away from indicating blind samples as positive. We also observed a significant reduction in accuracy with both blind samples and training samples during the blind test. Following the blind test, we retrained the dogs and recovered the higher accuracy initially obtained. These findings raise some critical theoretical questions related to stimulus control. Notably, the findings suggest that highly complex discriminations are more likely to be disrupted by intermittent reinforcement than simple discriminations; they also suggest that alternative sources of stimulus control are more likely to emerge with complex discriminations. The findings also raise practical questions related to the clinical utility of dogs as detectors of cancer.

Due to the increased usage of norm- and criterion-referenced assessments in the field, it is crucial that programs integrate more comprehensive assessment education and training. Behavior analysts have an ethical obligation to accurately administer assessments and understand reliability and validity evidence to support the use of assessments. Behavior analysts need proper education and training in the administration, scoring, and interpretation of assessment data along with the psychometric properties of assessments. The purpose of this study is to identify the breadth and depth of assessment coverage in behavior analysis graduate training programs. Twenty syllabi from Association for Behavior Analysis International Verified Course Sequence (ABAI-VCS) registered programs were reviewed and analyzed. Data were extracted on program components, such as geographic location, type and format of program, and degree area. Data were also extracted on types of assessment content (e.g., norm- and criterion-referenced), semi-structured/standardized types of assessments, psychometric properties (e.g., reliability, validity), readings, assignments, and incorporation of task list items from the BCBA Task List (5th ed.; BACB, 2017). Results indicate that the majority training programs lack educational content and training experiences external to the assessment content and evidence typically covered in behavior analysis (e.g., social validity, interobserver agreement, functional behavior assessment).