Association for Behavior Analysis International

Skinner’s 1945 treatise, “An Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms,” established a defining and fundamental characteristic of radical behaviorism by emphasizing the necessity of understanding scientific verbal behavior in terms of the same principles applied to the understanding of any behavior – that is, in terms of its antecedents and consequences. Further, his call for a functional analysis of any psychological concept was predicated on the position that only such an analysis would lead to more effective action with respect to the subject matter at issue. To the extent that “service” contributes to the survival of our discipline and world view, it follows that an examination of the conditions under which we speak of “service” may prove useful in our efforts to target and increase such activities. Thus, this talk will review some of the varied forms of professional activity that occasion service descriptions, with an eye toward creating and identifying opportunities, facilitating the professional actions needed, and consequating service efforts effectively.

Vincent Strully, Jr., CEO and Founder of The New England Center for Children (NECC®), is proud to accept the 2017 SABA Award for International Dissemination of Behavior Analysis on behalf of NECC. Despite the growing acceptance and demand for behavior analytic services, there are considerable challenges to developing sustainable models of service delivery internationally, including language barriers, differences in cultural practices, and funding considerations. Over the past 40 years, we have identified several components that are essential for the development of sustainable models of service delivery worldwide. Government funding and support are critical for success, as are training programs that provide local staff access to graduate-level instruction in behavior analysis. Also, NECC’s development of the Autism Curriculum Encyclopedia (ACE®), an application providing an interactive interface containing assessment tools, lesson plans, teaching materials, and student performance reports for over 1,900 skills, has provided an effective and efficient curriculum necessary for delivering sustainable services.

Behavior analysis has been foundational for a broad range of treatment and prevention interventions. However, there are reasons to believe that behavior analysts are not contributing to the improvement of societal wellbeing to the extent that B. F. Skinner envisioned in his seminal writings. In the past 2 years, I have spoken with hundreds of behavior analysts, many of whom expressed this kind of concern. I will summarize these concerns and suggest principles that might help behavior analysis as a field fulfill its promise to bring about unprecedented advances in human wellbeing. Specifically, I will suggest changing the criteria regarding what a behavior analysts should know from one that restricts our focus to practices and methods that are explicitly labeled as “behavior analytic” to one that encourages behavior analysts to embrace any empirical evidence or methods that contribute to human wellbeing, initiating much more empirical research on strategies for influencing climate change, and forging alliances with other areas of behavioral science.

Behavior Analysis has been a significant focus of the Psychology Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington since 1976. The department’s contributions to the field can be measured in research, teaching, and service. The faculty have published hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles, books and book chapters spanning the experimental analysis of behavior, applied behavior analysis, and translational research. Faculty and students closely collaborate on research, including: basic learning principles, choice, teaching, behavioral pharmacology, behavioral economics, stimulus control, memory span, contingency management, functional analysis, preference assessment, health behavior, animal behavior, and pediatric feeding. In addition to training countless undergraduate students in behavior analysis, the program has graduated 96 master’s students who have completed a thesis with a behavior analytic focus, and will begin training Ph.D. students in behavior analysis in 2017. Faculty have served in leadership roles within ABAI and Div. 25 of APA, and various other national, state and regional organizations. They have served as editors or editorial board members for key journals such as The Behavior Analyst, JEAB and JABA. The presentation will include a brief history of the department’s contributions, as well as a description of its vision for the training of behavior analysts.

Board certified behavior analysts, licensed psychologists, graduate students.

Delay discounting refers to a preference for smaller, sooner over larger, delayed outcome. Domain effects refer to a tendency for some outcomes to be more strongly discounted than others. We will review research that reports domain effects across a variety of special populations, but focus on an outcome that is one of the most steeply discounted food. Our laboratory, which examines delay discounting with obese rats and humans has uncovered a consistent pattern of domain-specific discounting effects with food as the outcome. In other words, the largest differences in obese and healthy-weight subjects tend to be with food or food-related outcomes. This domain-specific finding also has been shown in response to the treatment of mindful eating. Implications for using multiple relevant outcomes in discounting studies will be discussed. This presentation will also serve as an introduction to a panel discussion on the application of behavioral economics to obesity.

Certified behavior analysts, licensed psychologists, graduate students.

Behavioral analyses of the stimulus control for the phenomena characterized as bi-directional address critical issues in verbal behavioral development, verbal behavior, and relational responding. Laboratories have investigated naming as (a) derived relations, (b) its effects on other derived relations, (c) as well as the identification of experiences that contribute to the onset of naming as a behavioral developmental cusp. We present the perspectives of four laboratories on bi-directional naming.

The target audience consists of all behavior analysts with a theoretical and/or practical interest in the emergence, "generativity," or "explosion" of verbal skills in young children, and in how the basic behavioral principles can be utilized in teaching children with language delays more effectively.

Naming types have been identified as verbal behavior developmental cusps that result from a history of experiences. Different types of naming have been identified according to the stimuli controlling stimuli including: (a) naming involving actions, (b) additional auditory stimuli, (c) exclusion conditions, (d) familiar and unfamiliar stimuli, and (e) additional auditory stimuli. Some children who do not demonstrate naming can do so after several interventions and their educational prognosis improves as a result.

Humans often solve problems by engaging in a variety of strategies, some of which involve talking to themselves. This requires that they speak with understanding. Bidirectional Naming (BiN) is the term used (in behavior analysis) to refer to the ability to react as a listener to one's own speaker behavior. In this talk, I will describe basic, translational, and applied studies supporting the role of BiN in the development of complex skills such as categorization and analogical reasoning. Evidence for the role of BiN as a problem solving strategy comes from positive performances on complex matching-to-sample tasks after the use of verbal behavior training alone, and also from spontaneous vocalizations on the specific verbal strategies utilized by participants during or after task completion.

In the paper that gave rise to the study of stimulus equivalence, Sidman (1971) used the terms name/naming to generically designate responses under the discriminative control of pictures and printed words. In Skinnerian terms, he was referring to tact and textual relations. In Sidman's study, these discriminated operants emerged as a by-product of learning stimulus-stimulus relations. Although the response in a tact (or textual behavior) occurs under the control of a specific stimulus, if that stimulus is a member of an equivalence class, this implies that the response comes under the control of the class as a whole. The class, in turn, involves at least the primary item or environmental aspect, the spoken word/s, which was/were conventionally related to this item by the learner's verbal community [in the tact], and the corresponding printed word/s [in textual behavior]. Consequently, the learning history established listening and speaking behaviors in the same individual. This presentation will illustrate the formation of equivalence classes and the development of listening comprehension, tact, and textual behaviors in a sample of deaf children with cochlear implants.

The prevalence of obesity continues to climb in all age groups, and around the world. The standard paradigm assumes that we “eat too much and exercise too little, that obesity is due to two aberrant “behaviors”. However, are these behaviors cause or effect? Our research on children with brain tumors who develop hypothalamic damage and become obese after surgery or radiation, termed “hypothalamic obesity”, demonstrates that they have anatomic “leptin resistance”. In these subjects, excessive insulin release blocks leptin signaling to drive weight gain and hunger, while pharmacologic insulin suppression results in reduced food intake, increases spontaneous activity, and promotes weight loss. Why should insulin block leptin signaling? Leptin is a necessary signal to the VMH for the initiation of high-energy processes, such as puberty and pregnancy. If leptin always worked, then nobody could gain weight, and our reproductive capacity would be shot. Most obese people are hyperinsulinemic. But is that cause or effect? It is assumed that as you gain weight, cytokines are released from adipose tissue, which drive insulin resistance. However, our research demonstrates that dietary sugar is metabolized to fat in the liver, and it is this liver fat that drives insulin resistance unrelated to peripheral fat. Why should sugar drive insulin resistance? Naturally occurring sugar in fruit is what makes fruit palatable. But for our ancestors, fruit was readily available for one month per year, called “harvest time”. Then came four months of winter, and no food at all. We needed to stock up, to increase our adiposity in preparation for four months of famine. In other words, seasonal insulin resistance was evolutionarily adaptive; but year-round insulin resistance due to ubiquitous sugar availability has become maladaptive. It is assumed that people consume sugar because of its palatability. However, there is now evidence that sugar may be addictive in humans. Obese subjects will use sugar to treat psychological symptoms. Overweight women who were self-reported carbohydrate cravers reported greater relief from dysphoria in response to a carbohydrate-containing beverage as compared to a protein drink. Why are we drawn to sweet? Evolutionarily, sweetness was the signal to our ancestors that a given food was safe to eat because there are no sweet foods that are acutely poisonous (even Jamaican vomiting sickness only occurs after consumption of unripe ackee fruit, which is not sweet). Unfortunately, the food industry knows this and adds excess sugar to processed food to make us buy more. Thus, the behaviors associated with obesity are secondary to our biochemistry, and our biochemistry is secondary to our environment. Understanding these evolutionary precepts explain our obesity epidemic, and also point to environmental and policy solutions.

Practitioners working in behavioral medicine settings or environments where dietary issues impact behavioral responses.

This session is coupled with, and immediately follows, a SQAB tutorial on Behavioral Economics and Obesity presented by Dr. Erin Rasmussen. Panelists will be asked to speak briefly about their research program and to bring questions designed to foster discussion with audience members. The goal is to generate ideas and collaborative efforts among basic, translational, and applied scientists. The tutorial and panel discussion has arisen because the Society for the Quantitative Analysis of Behavior (SQAB), an organization that emphasizes fundamental sciences related to behavior analysis, meets immediately before ABAI. The tandem meetings of these two organizations present opportunities for attendees to hear about core sciences related to behavior analysis. The SQAB tutorials have provided an excellent spur for such discussions but we SQAB and ABAIs Science Board wish to take this a step further. This panel discussion, which represents a partnership between SQAB and ABAI, will create a setting in which basic and applied scientists, as well as practitioners, can meet to discuss applications of the topics raised in a SQAB tutorial.

individuals interested in applying the fundamental principles of behavioral economics to reducing caloric intake of increasing caloric expenditure.

Behavioral economic demand analyses quantify the degree to which organisms defend consumption of reinforcers. Emanating from the experimental analysis of behavior, demand analyses have rendered an abundance of success in modeling consumption and choice in highly controlled nonhuman studies. Translational applications in the 1980s demonstrated the potentiality of demand analyses in understanding substance use in human subject. Accordingly, contemporary research in addiction sciences has seen a marked proliferation in applying demand analyses in both translational and clinical settings. This SQAB Tutorial highlights translations of findings from basic studies on reinforcer demand to various issues of societal important. The presentation begins with a primer on demand assessment and analysis. Discussion of demand metrics with immediate translation to applied behavior analysis is provided. Particular examples from behavioral health domains are provided in the areas of alcohol, cigarette, marijuana, and indoor tanning demand. The presentation concludes with a discussion of other areas of translation in mainstream applied behavior analysis, such as validating preference assessments, determining token delivery and exchange schedules, and classroom based reinforcement contingencies for work completion.

Certified behavior analysts, psychologists, graduate students.

B. F. Skinner argued that neurobiology was not necessary to explain operant behavior. However, some of his most publicized conjectures could only be tested using neurobiological methods. For instance, 1959, in what may be one of the most decisive debates in modern psychology (or cognitive neuroscience), Noam Chomsky gutted Skinner's claims that human language were acquired via operant processes. By understanding and comparing the neurobiological mechanisms of operant learning in different animals, we now are beginning to accumulate evidence that Skinner was at least partially correct: there is a dedicated, evolutionarily conserved biochemical mechanism underlying behavioral learning which does not seem to be involved in the other forms of learning tested so far. This mechanism is also involved in acquiring at least the speech component of language, articulation. Coincidentally, such experiments also solved a technical problem first formulated by Skinner in 1935. Behavioral experiments were performed ~80% statistical power and have been internally replicated before publication. These replications often included different genetic modifications targeting the same biological structure, providing converging evidence for any given effect.

Fellow researchers, but it is my aim that graduate students should be able to follow and understand the talk nevertheless.

Schedule-induced or "adjunctive" behavior may occur related to a time based schedule when an individual produces behavior accompanying a scheduled stimulus delivery. In 1978, Foster exposed a lack of the term "adjunctive behavior" within the usage of JABA, while noting the potential significance of "adjunctive behavior" to applied settings. He had observed "numerous cases where professionals and paraprofessionals devoted strenuous, shortsighted, and futile efforts at directly modifying apparently adjunctive behaviors by imposing medications or consequences on them." Today, despite its contributions to the basic literature and its massive potential significance to applied settings, adjunctive behavior remains a topic infrequently explored by researchers interested in human populations, and may still be unfamiliar to behavior analysts lacking research experience or comprehensive backgrounds. This paper explores using a schedule-related analysis in providing ethical supervision and treatment for populations affected by trauma (for example, young children experiencing court-ordered visits with caregivers previously associated with aversive stimuli). Data are discussed in the context of engineering supportive environments for children with previous schedule related aversive experiences, as well as providing appropriate education and training for such families or others new to the analysis of stimulus schedule effects.

PENDING

The recurrence of previously eliminated operant behavior (i.e., relapse) represents a challenge to the long-term success of a wide variety of behavioral interventions. This tutorial will provide a review of common relapse phenomena (e.g., reinstatement, renewal, resurgence) using examples from both basic research and applied settings. A major emphasis will be on providing user-friendly descriptions of existing theories of relapse, especially theories of resurgence. Theories discussed will be Behavioral Momentum Theory, Context Theory, and Choice Theory. The successes and failures of these theories will be addressed, as will areas in need of additional empirical and theoretical development. Finally, translational relevance will be discussed by considering how insights provided by the theories might be used to prevent or reduce relapse following common behavioral interventions (e.g., DRA). This presentation will also serve as an introduction to a panel discussion on the application of theories of relapse.

Certified behavior analysts, graduate students.

Methods to support students' competencies often target isolated contexts or activate individual treatment agents. Conjoint Behavioral Consultation (CBC; Sheridan, Kratochwill & Bergan, 1996; Sheridan & Kratochwill, 2008), on the other hand, is an indirect intervention focused on the attainment of students' goals through (a) collaborative and consistent implementation of evidence-based interventions across home and school settings, and (b) data-based problem solving with parents and teachers working as partners. This presentation will review CBC and decades of empirical investigations that have documented its efficacy for promoting behavioral, social-emotional and academic competencies among children facing a range of behavioral and learning challenges. Research exploring outcomes for students, parents and teachers will be presented. A focus on translation and considerations for practice will be highlighted by exploring empirically-derived "active ingredients" (mediators) responsible for CBC's effects, conditions (moderators) under which desired outcomes are maximized, and a number of implementation lessons learned. Opportunities for future research and training will be explored.

Professionals who serve as consultants or who are interested in school/home consultation.

This session immediately follows Dr. Tim Shahan's SQAB tutorial entitled "Relapse," which introduces the fundamental principles underlying resurgence, renewal, and reinstatement. Panelists will be asked to speak briefly about their research program and to bring questions designed to foster discussion with audience members. The goal is to generate ideas and collaborative efforts among basic, translational, and applied scientists. The tutorial and panel discussion arose because the Society for the Quantitative Analysis of Behavior (SQAB), an organization that emphasizes fundamental sciences related to behavior analysis, meets immediately before ABAI. The tandem meetings of these two organizations present opportunities for attendees to hear about core sciences related to behavior analysis. The SQAB tutorials have provided an excellent spur for such discussions but SQAB and ABAI's Science Board wish to take this a step further. This panel discussion, which represents a partnership between SQAB and ABAI, will create a setting in which basic and applied scientists, as well as practitioners, can meet to discuss applications of the topics raised in a SQAB tutorial.

The target audience is investigators involved with translating or applying the core principles of behavior analysis.

The Human Factors and Aging Laboratory (www.hfaging.org) is specifically oriented toward psychological science that supports successful aging. Our research does not emphasize loss of function associated with aging; rather, we wish to understand how to enable older adults to retain and enhance their ability to function in later life. Our research efforts are conducted within the framework of human factors psychology and we strive to apply that scientific knowledge to better design products, environments, and training. There is much potential for technology to enable older adults to age successfully. In this presentation I will provide an overview of the needs, capabilities, preferences, and limitations of older adults as well as the role of human factors research for technology design. I will then discuss our research on the design of technologies with examples ranging from mobile apps to personal robots. Central to my presentation will be a focus on research questions, methods, and areas of application.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.

Depression is consistently associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD) and other CVD risk factors such as obesity. The mechanisms of this association are likely multifactorial, but identifying behavioral mechanisms of the association are imperative to developing and disseminating effective interventions that can impact both symptoms of depression and health behaviors that lead to CVD. Dr. Whited’s presentation will briefly review the literature regarding depression treatment for CVD prevention, and introduce one potential intervention, behavioral activation treatment for depression (BATD), that has potential to fill this role. BATD is a brief individual treatment for depression that focuses on replacing depressogenic behaviors with behaviors that reduce or eliminate depressive symptoms based on the patients’ life values. Health behavior change can also be seamlessly incorporated into BATD treatment so that both depressive symptoms and health behaviors are simultaneously impacted. Dr. Whited will conclude by presenting data from various sources supporting BATD approaches for health behavior change.

Behavior analysts and clinical psychologists

Null Hypothesis Statistical Testing (NHST) was developed to provide an objective way to quantify inference. The result is a ritualized technique that is frequently necessary for publication despite criticisms that it is minimally informative, misleading, and produces unreproducible results. NHST tests the probability of the data given a null hypothesis that is rarely of interest and is often implausible. The result is a torturous statement of whether the data are likely to have occurred. An alternative approach, called Information Theoretic (IT) based inference, does not carry many of these problems because it returns a different probability. IT approaches ask the question of interest in model building: Of a set of models, which ones are best? And by how much? By building upon Akaike Information Criteria, IT inference returns the probability of the models considered given the data, numbers that are readily interpretable. Unlike NHST, the approach actually encourages the testing of many models in order to increase the chances of including good ones. Corrections for multiple comparisons are neither necessary nor appropriate. The tutorial will identify criticisms of NHST, offer a (relatively) nontechnical background for IT approaches, and provide examples of IT-based inference using spreadsheets.

Certified behavior analysts, graduate students, licensed psychologists.

Senior leaders spend a tremendous amount of time planning and resourcing their strategic initiatives. Yet numerous studies have found that 70% of these strategies fall far short of their goals. Why? Employees have learned to wait out new initiatives to see if their leaders are serious about the change. They look for signs that go far beyond an exciting vision and the provision of ample resources; they want to see day-to-day leadership behaviors that indicate a sustained, personal commitment to the strategy. Through 30 years of consulting to senior leaders, the author has found a winning formula to quickly derive the top leadership behaviors that will accelerate strategy execution at any firm. The key is to find the unique behaviors that will signal a serious commitment to change for this strategy, this leadership team, at this point in time and to get them implemented in a highly visible, coordinated way. Three case studies will be shared: (1) a global airline that improved the customer service delivered by 29,000 flight attendants; (2) a global oil company that improved capital decision making across 12,000 employees, and; (3) a pharmaceutical company that transformed itself into a patient centric, customer focused organization.

Practitioners in Organizational Behavior Management (OBM), and those who have an interest in OBM, large-scale behavior change, systemic analyses, and sustainable behavior change.

Lloyd Morgan’s Canon advises that animal behavior should not be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development. Leaving aside how we might define ‘higher’ and ‘lower’, this is encouraging to the behaviorist, except that we might say that interpreting human behavior should be subject to the same strictures. But, whether an explanation appealing to the simplest possible processes works is an empirical matter. In this talk I’ll describe three experiments with New Caledonian crows, two published and one not at the time of writing, on putative behavioral innovation in metatool use, putative causal understanding in the Aesop’s Fable task, and putative flexibility of tool manufacture in response to environmental demands. I’ll explore the role of the behaviorist in contributing interpretations and devising control conditions when collaborating with behavioral ecologists, consider how the word fairly in Morgan’s Canon should be interpreted, and discuss how we should be guided by the principle of parsimony in understanding behavior.

Graduate Students and Researchers in Behavior Analysis

Increased availability of reimbursement options in autism intervention has led to increased scrutiny of the business practices of autism service providers. In particular, providers of Applied Behavior Analysis have been subject to increased scrutiny of their billing practices, which has on several occasions led to federal investigations. This session will equip providers with basic information about the federal government’s tools for investigating and prosecuting health care fraud.

Practitioners of applied behavior analysis, particularly business owners

The Supportive Education for Returning Veterans (SERV) curriculum has been able to retain and graduate ninety percent of the student veterans that complete the courses. The curriculum model includes credit-bearing resiliency orientation to full semester courses. Courses are cohort-based, learner-centered, and use a problem-based learning model that promotes a healthy support system as student veterans navigate their academic career.

Educators, practitioners, students

Every species possesses abilities for successfully interacting with its environment. These result from phylogeny. In the laboratory, one may arrange artificial conditions that thwart an organisms abilities. The result may be a phenomenon. With sufficient training, however, the phenomenon may prove to be ephemeral, as the organisms basic abilities reassert themselves. A common ability among animal species is the ability to respond to differences and non-differences in rate of obtaining food. This ability may be thwarted in a variety of ways, but the results tend to be ephemeral. A clear example appears in an experiment that pitted pigeons preference for unimpeded responding against their ability to respond to food rate. In a concurrent-chains procedure, the terminal links were identical variable-interval schedules, but in one terminal link, every response produced a timeout. The duration of the timeout varied, and preference varied with it, but the relation vanished with training, in keeping with the equality of food rate across the two terminal links. Some other examples of phenomena that tend to disappear with sufficient training are behavioral contrast, conditioned reinforcement, and resistance to extinction. These appear to be behavioral ephemera.

Graduate Students and Researchers in Behavior Analysis

We describe a model used to teach the principles of behavior analysis and their application in the human services to students and practitioners over the past five decades. Materials for the book were developed in the late 1960’s at the University of Michigan School of Social Work, where the first presenter began his teaching career in 1968. The second presenter supervised the administration and testing of the materials. The course content and testing materials were continuously revised and updated over the following years by both presenters, based on data related to student mastery of the content. The teaching model was influenced by the prominent educational technology at the time, including: (1) the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan; (2) the programmed instructional format of Skinner and Holland, and that of Geis, Stebbins, and Lundin; (3) Fred Keller’s Personal System of Instruction (PSI); and (4) Robert Mager’s influential publication on preparing instructional objectives. The first presenter will describe the methodology used to develop the materials and how they provided the basis for a textbook that has been revised over six editions. The second presenter will describe how the materials and resulting textbook were used in undergraduate, graduate and professional courses and seminars. Together, the two presenters will provide examples of their experiences using the textbook to teach behavior analysis. They will present the rationale for the organization and structure of the text and course, along with reasons for including and excluding specific content. The two presenters identify historical, methodological, and conceptual issues that formed the underpinnings of their unique approach to teaching behavior analysis, as well as how the model has evolved. The two presenters, one from a primarily academic perspective and the other from a primarily applied perspective, provide complementary viewpoints on this topic.

Individuals teaching behavior analysis or those training students and practitioners in behavior analysis.

Practice guidelines synthesize the published literature on a particular area of applied practice. Practice guidelines may also include specific recommendations for use of strategies and models to guide clinical decision-making. Agencies that provide applied behavior analytic (ABA) services can use practice guidelines to standardize their clinical services in pursuit of enhanced quality. This presentation presents a model for how to create recommended practice guidelines. The model includes a structured approach to literature synthesis, creation of tools and templates that facilitate implementation of best practices, and incorporation of feedback on utility to the practicing behavior analyst. This presentation focuses on the organizational systems that must be developed in order to develop and implement recommended practice guidelines at large scale. In addition, the presentation will include two examples of published practice guidelines that have been developed using the model. The first example focuses on recommended practices for selecting measures for problem behavior. The second example focuses on recommended practices for individual supervision for aspiring behavior analysts.

Practicing behavior analysts

Many children diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disabilities are also diagnosed with comorbid pediatric feeding disorders. Assessment and treatment approaches using an applied behavior analytic model have been associated with successful outcomes for children who display total food refusal and food selectivity. Nevertheless, ABA approaches are often under-utilized by most front-line clinicians and interventionists. More concerning, however, is that most behavior analysts receive little pre-service training in this area and yet are often called on to address feeding concerns. In this tutorial, this issue will be addressed by covering the following four areas: 1) providing a basic ABA framework to assessment and treatment, 2) identify a scope and sequence for treatment, 3) promoting appropriate, measurable goals to establish success or failure of treatment efforts, and 4) when to refer children to programs that have more time, more resources, or simply have more expertise to address a specific childs feeding concern. Implications for the use of ABA approaches in assessment and treatment in feeding problems in young children will also be discussed to help advance an appropriate scope of practice that is ethically acceptable for the typically practicing BCBA who has little to no formal pre-service training in the area of feeding disorders.

Board certified behavior analysts, licensed psychologists, graduate students.

Behavioral scientists have much to offer, and much to gain from being involved in federal research funding. The National Science Foundation funds basic and applied research in many areas of interest to behavior analysts. In general, funded research advances theory and has substantial broader impacts beyond the results of the research itself. This presentation reviews the proposal and review process including the criteria of intellectual merit and broader impact, highlights opportunities in Decision, Risk & Management Sciences, and describes three funding mechanisms that may be of special interest: dissertation improvement grants for doctoral students; CAREER grants for early-career behavioral scientists; and research in undergraduate institutions (RUI) grants for faculty at undergraduate colleges and universities.The presentation finishes with suggestions for raising the profile of Behavior Analytic Science in this realm.

Applied and basic researchers interested in securing NSF funding.

Although evidence has grown with respect to identifying pharmacological approaches to the treatment of severe disruptive behaviors, many challenges have limited progress to date. Few medications have FDA approved indications for the treatment of behavioral disturbance in the population with developmental disorders, and questions can be raised about their specificity. Problems with heterogeneity of study populations can challenge the ability to identify therapeutic signals as well as the generalizability of findings. This presentation will review the current evidence base for addressing common behavioral target symptoms and underscore the need for a change in the current path of drug development to a more integrated, biobehavioral approach.

Behavior Analysts, Psychologists, Psychiatrists

From the effects of the temporal separation of responses and their consequences (as in delayed reinforcement) to the effects on behavior of events no longer present (as in verbal reports), behavior analysts study behavior extended in time. They are therefore either implicitly or explicitly concerned with the phenomena colloquially called remembering and forgetting. These phenomena have also been focuses of attention for those of the cognitive rather than the behavioral persuasion. This tutorial explores some properties of remembering and forgetting as revealed in both the behavioral and the cognitive literatures. What we know about remembering can contribute significantly to both our basic research and our applications. Cases to be considered include, among others: why remembering should be treated as a skill that can be shaped; how remembering varies with what is to be remembered; why remembering is better interpreted as recall of behavior with respect to stimuli no longer present than as recall of the stimuli themselves; how contingencies affect both forgetting and the creation of false memories; and how behavioral criteria can be applied to the distinctions among different varieties of remembering, such as short-term versus long-term memory or recall versus recognition.

The content of this tutorial as relevant to all behavior analysts, whatever their level of training.

Every time you make a choice—whether it is what soda to buy or who to marry—you are making a creative decision about what kind of person you want to be and what kind of choice that person would make. Sheena Iyengar has dedicated her work to studying these choices, how and why we make them, and what they say about ourselves. Through examples that are at once illuminating and entertaining, she paints a picture of the pleasures and the burdens of a world that offers us seemingly endless options for making our lives unique.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.

Skinner's Quests describes a fictional odyssey by a young B. F. Skinner to England in 1939. His two quests were prompted by philosopher Bertrand Russell and involved Russell's protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. The intellectual quest was to redirect Wittgenstein's changing analysis of language toward something Russell would find palatable. The political quest—undertaken for the White House —was to provide insights about the behavior of Adolf Hitler, who had been at high school with Wittgenstein. Skinner went chiefly to meet Sigmund Freud, near death in London after moving from Vienna in 1938. He had cited Freud often, with more admiration than agreement. Skinner met several other characters of historical importance, including Alan Turing. He also had numerous encounters with entirely fictional characters. Some were romantic. Some were merely social. Some had a sinister edge that reflected the time of his travels, one of modern history's most fraught periods. I'll describe the novel's provenance and possible achievements, and set out some of the behavioral issues examined in the novel. These mostly concern verbal behavior and are often presented within an evolutionary framework. I'll show how the backdrop of Europe's unsettling politics of the time was used to enrich the discussions of behavioral issues.

Behavior analysts interested in the history of behavior analysis, its conceptual foundations, and the B. F. Skinner biography.

Making sound value-based decisions in a changing environment is an integral part of our daily economic-based decisions and our overall survival. Dopamine is a neuromodulator that is thought to represent reward value, but is almost exclusively studied within the context of positive reinforcement. Here, we are applying behavioral economic theory to address the role of dopamine in the valuation of not only positive, but also negative reinforcement. Either sucrose, or the opportunity to avoid electric foot shock, is provided to rats across ten ascending prices within a single experimental session. By assessing the rate at which individual demand curves decay, we compute a metric (alpha) that represents the worth a rat places on an outcome. Using voltammetry, we found that the concentration of dopamine observed at both sucrose- and avoidance-predictive cues decreased as a function of price, although an initial suppression was observed in the avoidance task. Using optogenetics, we found that modulating dopamine concentration similarly alters the valuation of sucrose and avoidance. Our results suggest that a transient dopamine signal represents the worth an animal places on any advantageous outcome.

BCBAs at both the doctoral and master's level.

Children with ASD and typically developing children were given a choice of responding to view social images or responding to view nonsocial images. Results showed that children with ASD responded significantly more to view the nonsocial images as compared to the typically developing children. This demonstrates that the nonsocial stimuli are more potent reinforcers for the behavior of children with ASD, as compared to typically developing children. The Nonsocial Reinforcement Hypothesis of ASD asserts that infants develop ASD because they have a strong affinity for nonsocial reinforcers. When nonsocial stimuli are more rereinforcing than social stimuli, the environment selects and shapes varies forms of stereotyped and repetitive behavior rather than verbal and social behaviors. Indeed, verbal operants such as tacts and intraverbals are shaped and maintained by social reinforcement, and are often missing or delayed in children with ASD. Echoic behavior, which is more often seen in children with autism, do not require the same type of social reinforcement since copying a stimulus may be reinforcing in itself. The affinity for nonsocial reinforcers may have negative effects on the establishment of a variety of social stimuli as conditioned reinforcers, which further hampers the development of communication, social skills and social interests.

Professional behavior analysts who are BCBA-certified, applied researchers

In his magnum opus, The Behavior of Organisms (Skinner, 1938) Skinner presented an experimental analysis of behavior that eschewed averaging data across subjects. Even at the time, this stance was unusual, and since then has become even more so. Since the 1950's more than 80% of published quantitative empirical research in Psychology has used group mean data analysed by null-hypothesis statistical tests (NHST). Recently in behavior analysis there have been recurrent calls for the more widespread use of averaging (and NHST) and claims that this would make behavior analysis more acceptable to mainstream psychology. So, was Skinner right, or should we resort to conventional data analytic practices? This paper will review the recent calls for change within behavior analysis about averaging. Then it will consider some developments in fields outside of behavior analysis that bear on the question. It will consider implications from biology and natural selection. It will also consider growing criticisms of group averaging from within mainstream psychology, especially from personality research. Finally it will consider the implications of fundamental measurement theory concerned with ergodicity. The conclusion - Skinner was right, and behavior analysis should keep faith with his rejection of group averaging.

Basic and applied researchers and methodologists in behavior analysis and those concerned with the behavior of scientists

Many animal species have been shown to have abilities previously thought to be exclusive to humans, including the use and manufacture of tools, the capacity to solve novel problems without reinforcement of intermediate steps, planning behavioral sequences, and sudden acquisition of relational concepts without reinforcement. These findings pose hard challenges to behavioral analysis, as they require the articulation of hypotheses about the know-how that animals inherit, how this know-how is modified it by individual and social experience, and how all of this information combines to generate innovative behavior. I will present and discuss examples from research on crows, parrots, human infants and other species, with a focus on our quest for parsimonious theoretical accounts of apparently intelligent behavior.

BCBAs with a Master's or Doctoral degree.

A Norwegian national implementation strategy aimed to test and conduct a large-scale implementation of The Oregon model of Parent Management Training (PMTO) based on Gerald Patterson's Social Interaction and Learning theory. The program targets children with antisocial behavior and co-occurring problems and their families. A randomized trial demonstrated the effectiveness of the program, and identified central moderators, mediators and predictors. Fidelity to the PMTO model was found to predict child behavioral outcomes better than parent-reported treatment alliance. Several parents seemed to manage with shorter interventions, and the "Early Interventions for Children at Risk" program was designed for implementation in the municipalities. In line with findings from a study of the normative development of aggression, this adapted program targets children from the age of 3 years on. In sum, findings confirmed that PMTO principles and components could be successfully transported from US to real-world settings in Norway with sustained positive outcomes and maintenance of competent adherence. PMTO has been tested with positive outcomes in both individual and group trainings and in high and low dosages of treatment. The Norwegian project may serve as an inspiration for the testing and scaling up of evidence-based parenting programs in other countries, particularly in Europe.

Professionals interested in the effectiveness, implementation, and scaling up of parenting interventions for families with children with antisocial behaviour and co-occurring problem.

Skinner's (1957) analysis of language has much to offer clinicians interested in teaching verbal behavior to persons with autism. Much of the research in this area has emphasized the teaching of speaker behavior with less work dedicated to a thorough analysis of the contingencies operating on the behavior of the listener. Possibly due to this lack of attention, cognitive explanations of comprehension, understanding, and word recognition have persisted. A special form of multiple control called joint stimulus control may provide an alternative and cogent behavioral analysis of complex listener behavior. The purpose of this presentation is to provide an overview of the conceptual analysis of joint control and the basic and applied research that has followed. Video demonstrations of the teaching of joint control with participants from a recently published study and additional clinical applications will be presented to illustrate the implementation of joint control procedures in applied settings.

Behavior Analysts, Educators, Psychologists, Speech-Language Pathologists

In instructional texts, response differentiation and stimulus discrimination procedures are usually treated separately, but shaping inherently establishes discriminative control by proprioceptive and other stimuli automatically and differentially produced in the emission of effective and ineffective response forms; antecedent control by response-produced stimuli inheres in shaping. In many cases, effective shaping might not require a specification of the discrimination of response-produced stimuli generated under differential reinforcement; other problems might demand a more fine-grained analysis. One such problem might be that of altering the variability/stereotypy of a response form, in which differential reinforcement may be viewed as establishing the discriminative and conditional reinforcing potency of the stimuli produced in the inchoate emission of acts that are either similar to, or different from, those recently emitted. When control by such stimuli is weak, procedures specifically designed to enhance the SD and S? functions of stimuli produced by repetitive and non-repetitive acts might be of substantial utility. Recent experiments indicate that the differential reinforcement of repetition or non-repetition indeed generates discriminations of the criterion-defining dimensions of response-produced stimuli of effective and ineffective acts, not undifferentiated novelty, and that interventions designed to alter stereotypy/variability might be rendered more effective by the facilitation of such self-discrimination.

Researchers in basic behavioral processes, professional applied behavior analysts, advanced students

Usage-based theories see language as a complex adaptive system: the interaction between history the processes that shape how languages are passed from one generation to the next and human psychology the set of unique social and cognitive capacities that allow generations to learn a language in the first place. I will argue that findings from language acquisition research, typology, and psycholinguistics are converging on the idea that language is fundamentally built out of use and generalizations over those usage events. Interestingly, none of the fundamental mechanisms of the usage-based approach are required to be a language-specific adaptation. Language shows creativity, categories, and recursion because people think creatively, categorically, and recursively. I will discuss a range of experimental, corpus and observational work showing that understanding the developmental of language acquisition can benefit from integrating the developmental of non-linguistic faculties, such as executive control, categorization and social-reasoning.

Researchers and practitioners interested in theories of language

Since the resurgence of interest in dog behavior in 1998, many claims have been made for unique social-cognitive skills in dogs. I will briefly review available evidence that dogs are able to respond to human behavior in ways that are not available to other nonhuman species. I conclude there is no well-established finding regarding dog's social-cognitive behavior that cannot be accounted for with species-general learning mechanisms. Notwithstanding an absence of special social-cognitive skills, even the most informal interaction with dogs suggests that there is something remarkable about their motivation to interact with people. I review several lines of evidence that indicate that during domestication dogs became much more motivated to interact with members of other species and more reinforced by that interaction. This started with Pavlov who noted a "social reflex" in his dogs and continues to the present day in a range of studies. I will consider dogs' play behaviors, proximity seeking to a human, and even studies of what behaviors lead dogs to getting adopted. In conclusion, the notion of the dog as "man's best friend" may be a cliche, but it is a stereotype with some observable behavior behind it.

Graduate-level behavior analysts and psychologists

Disruption is the act of changing cultural practices, and introducing new practices, that involve a greater emphasis on social responsibility and sustainability. I will discuss several facets of disruption as it pertains to entrepreneurship. First, I will provide an overview of disruption itself and why it matters, along with case studies from the entrepreneurial world. Secondly, I will address what many consider to be the primary obstacle to disruption, and to entrepreneurship, which is failure, or more precisely, the fear of failure, and strategies that others have used in the past to remove failure as an obstacle to success. I will also discuss how disruption can take place anywhere, and in any industry, toward the improvement of the human condition. Lastly, I will discuss characteristics that comprise the disruptive leader, along with common challenges such leaders face and the outcomes to which they strive.

Professionals, academics, and graduate students.

Scientific research can be studied as investigative behavior. That involves inventing problems as well as solving them. It also involves finding better ways to do one's work. That activity has sometimes been called philosophy. Skinner himself said that behaviorism is a philosophy. I would add that the philosophy was part of a scientific research program. Skinner complained that his critics failed to understand his position, which was based on a hard analogy (not a metaphor) between the processes of learning and evolution by natural selection. Right thinking in the one provides clues to right thinking in the other. The advantage of getting rid of teleology in both is fairly straight-forward. Skinner paid less attention to the importance of getting rid of typological (essentialist) thinking about species and other groups of organisms. These have been treated as if they were abstract classes with essences rather than as concrete wholes. Variation has been screened out and persons have been treated as tokens of stereotypes. One result has been a misguided search for universals of human behavior.

Behavior analysts interested in the historical and conceptual foundations of B. F. Skinner's behaviorism, the relations between the behavioral and biological sciences, and analyses of the behavior of scientists.

The responses we call aesthetic are instances of synergetic phenomena�elements interacting with a transformative effect. Such effects are pervasive in nature, as when chemical reagents react to create another substance, DNA creates organisms, or photosynthesis creates leaves. This conceptualization of aesthetic responses as synergetic phenomena puts the spotlight on the behavioral priming histories of audiences (viewers, listeners, etc.) with respect to the interacting elements�sounds, visual stimuli, words, abstract concepts. actions, or sensations. Aesthetic responses are complex, surprise-tinged emotional reactions. Artists, composers, poets, writers, performers, architects, or chefs create aesthetic effects by assembling such elements as ingredients of �synergetic brews.� To create these brews, they use a limited set of concept manipulation devices. Key factors that determine the aesthetic impact of such synergetic brews are prevailing behavioral contingencies and potentiating circumstances that act much like catalysts for the synergetic interaction�for instance, socio-cultural factors. Mechner shows how synergetic effects based on the use of the described concept manipulation devices are manifested in diverse art forms and disciplines�music, visual art, literature, humor, architecture, science, etc. He also shows how some of these devices can be modeled in the laboratory, and proposes research strategies for increasing our understanding of the pervasive behavioral phenomenon we call aesthetics. Dr. Killeen will offer comments following Dr. Mechner's paper.

Intermediate; master's level (BCBA) or master's students.

The use of cannabis (marijuana) for medical and non-medical purposes is expanding worldwide and now includes legal retail outlets for purchasing cannabis products in many areas. Retail cannabis products are varied with respect to dose and intended route of administration, yet the preponderance of scientific data is limited to analysis of the effects of smoked cannabis. This presentation will summarize data from a series of controlled human laboratory studies evaluating the dose effects of oral, smoked, and vaporized cannabis in healthy, non-tolerant individuals. Outcome measures to be described include subjective ratings of drug effects, cardiovascular measures, cannabinoid quantitation in biological fluid, and performance on psychomotor, memory, and divided attention tasks. Implications of the study findings will be discussed with respect to regulation of medical and non-medical cannabis products, drug testing, and education.

Masters and Doctoral Level BCBAs

The landscape surrounding cannabis use is changing dramatically. Legalized medical and recreational use is spreading, habitual use is growing, perceptions of harm are decreasing and the concentration of THC, the main psychoactive ingredient, is rising; consequently, increased problems associated with cannabis use have been predicted. A better understanding of the mechanisms that underlie cannabis use disorder and effective treatments are therefore needed. This presentation will describe the use of human drug discrimination procedures to determine the neuropharmacological mechanisms of the interoceptive effects of THC and identify targets for treatment. This research has demonstrated that GABA and voltage-dependent calcium channels (VDCC) are involved in the response to cannabis in humans. This presentation will then discuss the use of human laboratory drug self-administration procedures, combined with medication maintenance, as a strategy for determining the initial safety, tolerability and efficacy of ligands at these targets as potential treatments. Studies with the GABA reuptake inhibitor tiagabine and the VDCC ligand pregabalin will be described. Lastly, the presentation will include initial results from research that has integrated neuroimaging, non-invasive electrical brain stimulation and acute drug administration techniques to study cannabis-use disorder.

In this talk I will discuss how we can analyse "mental health" symptoms, the DSM and psychological therapies as behaviours-in-context. The main focus will be on the social, economic, societal and cultural contexts, and showing the historical invention and development of "mental health" metaphors as western societies changed. Along the way I will illustrate with examples drawn from my participatory research on the "mental health" of Indigenous and refugee communities. The discussion will also highlight what needs to be changed within behaviour analysis if it wishes to engage more in social and community research.

Academic and professional behavior analysts

Marijuana is the most commonly used illicit drug in the United States with recent surveys estimating over 22 million current (past month) users. However, there is growing acceptance of its recreational use, evident by successful efforts to decriminalize and, in some states like Colorado, legalize use. In addition, although the full medicinal value of cannabis is not yet understood, such cannabinergic effects are of known benefit in the palliative care of anorectic patients undergoing chemotherapy or suffering debilitating conditions such as AIDS or Alzheimer?s disease. This has led to a broadening interest in the clinical utility of drugs that target the endocannabinoid system. In this regard, however, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, is generally acknowledged to produce some unwanted effects in humans. These include deleterious effects on several types of complex behavior, especially related to learning, memory, and vigilance. Employing operant techniques in nonhuman primates such as drug discrimination, self-administration, nociception assays, and touchscreen-based models of learning and memory, this presentation will highlight recent advances in the understanding of THC?s effects on complex behavioral processes and, as well, efforts to develop drugs that engage the cannabinergic system and retain medicinal value, yet produce lesser adverse psychoactive effects.

Behavior analysts interested in the behavioral effects of marijuana and the development of improved cannabis therapeutics.

The word identity seems ubiquitous. It is a focus of contemporary social science, appears regularly in the media, and occurs increasingly often in everyday conversation, especially on college campuses and among the cultural cognoscenti. Typically, it is used as or paired with a descriptor - such as gender identity, ethnic identity, or identity crisis - and then offered as an explanation of some behavioral phenomena, including gender and ethnic differences, the results of presidential elections, and even B. F. Skinner’s enrollment in graduate school following his “dark year” as a fledging writer. While behavior analysts eschew such explanations, most people, including most behavioral and social scientists, are more interested in the temporally extended patterns of complex behavior subsumed by terms like identity than they are in the foci of much current behavior analytic research. Cogent behavioral accounts of identity and related phenomena are available, but typically garner little attention. Borrowing from these, a behavior analysis of identity is presented and then used to reflect on the identity of behavior analysis itself. If identity consists of patterns of behavior, it appears that our identity is changing. Within behavior analysis, the extraordinary success of the applied wing has overshadowed our identity as a basic behavioral science. Outside behavior analysis, our identity as a viable, comprehensive behavioral science has diminished. We appear to be having an identity crisis, and if it is important to retain our scientific identity, we need to address it.

Pending