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open access

An Extension of a Peer-Mentoring Training Program for College-Aged Students

Description: An important predictor of the success of a peer-mentoring program is the quality of the relationship between the peer mentor and the mentee. A previous study identified target outcomes, operationally defined target behaviors, and developed a computer-based instruction (CBI) training module to teach peer mentors relationship skills. The previous study suggested that the CBI training module increased target behaviors in pre-and post-tests that were typed. The current study replicated and extended… more
Date: December 2022
Creator: Luna Rodriguez, Araceli
open access

The Effects of Voluntary and Involuntary Muscle Recruitment Training on the Strength of Isometric Muscle Contractions

Description: Approximately 50% of individuals who undergo total knee arthroplasty (TKA) fail to achieve a full functional recovery. Current physical therapy practices commonly utilize neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) to passively activate quadriceps muscles. This passive approach does not directly reteach the lost response, but can strengthen the atrophied muscle. Study 1 compared surface electromyography with biofeedback (sEMGBF) with a changing criterion design to NMES alone. Study 2 compared s… more
Date: December 2022
Creator: Armshaw, Gabriel Luke

Change AGENT Project Part 2: Further Analyses of Progress Following Staff Training on Responsive, Goal-Directed, and Rationale-Based Decision Making

Description: Evidence-based practice in ABA is a complex decision-making process involving frequent adjustments in goals and procedures as informed by science, client need, and clinical wisdom. Consistent with the science's foundations, incredible gains are possible for children with autism when practitioners are systematically trained to understand, produce, and be responsive to shifting conditions for change. However, minimal standards for training promote inflexibility and rule following, at the expense … more
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Date: December 2022
Creator: Schleifer-Katz, Evan
open access

Investigating the Role of Concurrent Verbal Behavior in a Rule-Shifting Scenario

Description: The present study evaluates the effects of incompatible verbal behavior when engaging in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). The WCST is a complex task that requires participants to match stimulus cards based on self-generated rules. After a varying number of trials, the rule changes and the participant will have to self-generate a new rule. Verbal behavior, specifically joint control, is likely involved in rule-following. Seven participants took part in this study. Participants engaged in… more
Date: August 2022
Creator: Cutler, Jacquelyn Marie

An Evaluation of Differential Attention on Preferred Topics of Conversation for Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Description: Extensive speech on preferred conversation topics may limit conversations with others. For individuals with ASD, extensive speech on a topic may be a form of restricted or repetitive behavior that may be addressed through skill building. However, previous research suggests that skill building may not be necessary if the behavior is sensitive to differential reinforcement contingencies. To evaluate the effects of differential reinforcement in the form of attention on conversation topics, we repl… more
Date: August 2022
Creator: Castillo, Michelle Victoria
open access

Tales by Moonlight: An Exploratory Analysis of the Effects of a Storytelling Interview Package for Youths and Elders in an Historically Black Community

Description: Storytelling is a practice that is used to pass down important information about culture, environment, and history. From a behavior analytic perspective, the process of storytelling involves contingencies and can be viewed within the framework of the Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior. For each listener, based on their history of learning and experiences, stories enable a unique type of learning about reinforcers, punishers and cultural context. In African American oral tradition, storytelli… more
Date: August 2022
Creator: Akinwale, Oluwabukola Elizabeth
open access

Investigating the Effects of Teaching on Response Allocation by Implementing a Changing Criterion Procedure

Description: The study of choice and allocation has often focused on certain parameters of reinforcement, but rarely on historical variables. The goal of this study was to investigate the potential effects of gradual vs. abrupt teaching methods on future response allocation. A secondary goal was to see if the results of teaching-method manipulations might be correlated with the parameters that the teaching method produced, specifically unit costs, rate of reinforcement, or error rates. Results indicate that… more
Date: August 2022
Creator: Krilcich, Rachel AnnaSoo
open access

Exploring Functional Interdependence of Mands, Tacts, and Intraverbals after Brain Injury

Description: One goal of this study was to evaluate the emergence of mands and intraverbals following tact acquisition for individuals with aphasia due to acquired brain injury. A second goal was to evaluate the transfer of shortened latencies as a function of tact training across untrained operants. In Study 1, the dependent measure was accuracy of responding and in Study 2, the dependent measures were rate and latency of responding. Participants for Study 1 were two uninjured adults (pilot) and two adults… more
Date: August 2022
Creator: Baltazar-Mars, Marla
open access

The Effects of Using Arbitrary Symbols in Naming Procedures with Adults

Description: Naming refers to encountering a new word and subsequently being able to use it both expressively and receptively. Sometimes, this can happen in as little as a single experience. Several recent studies have explored factors that influence the acquisition of naming in adults. However, these studies used familiar stimuli for which the participants already had names. In these studies, preexisting stimulus-response relations with the stimuli could have impeded the acquisition of new names for some p… more
Date: May 2022
Creator: Jaramillo, Andia

Reliability of Treatment Integrity Assessment with Multiple Observers: Can Agreement Be Assumed?

Description: Interobserver agreement (IOA) was calculated across three participant dyads for a generalized treatment integrity tool. No dyads achieved 80% agreement during baseline. Task clarification was piloted as an intervention for two of the three dyads. Form agreement produced stabilization in both dyads and improvement in one dyad. Time agreement did not improve but demonstrated marked trends in one dyad.
Date: May 2022
Creator: Cohen, Lindsay Anne
open access

Exploring the Efficacy of Percentile Schedules with the Amplitude of Muscular Contractions

Description: Percentile reinforcement schedules have been used to systematically alter inter-response times, behavioral variability, breath carbon monoxide levels, duration of social behaviors, and various other properties of behavior. However, none of the previous studies have examined the effectiveness of percentile schedules in relation to the magnitude of muscular contractions. This control over magnitude of muscular responding has important implications relating to the strengthening of muscles and corr… more
Date: May 2022
Creator: Goodhue, Rob

Exploring the Effects of Cultural Consequences Identified through a Ranking Task on the Interlocking Behavioral Contingencies of Ethically Self-Controlled Responses with Participants with Pre-Existing Relationships

Description: This study explored the effects of cultural consequences identified through a ranking task on the selection of interlocking behavioral contingencies and aggregate products constituting ethically self-controlled responses when participants had pre-existing relationships. Two experiments were conducted to explore these effects. Experiment 1 had two triads of three participants each recruited from a university-based autism center. Experiment 2 had three triads of three participants each; participa… more
Date: May 2022
Creator: Elwood, Chelsea Christina
open access

A Safe and Fast Deworming Procedure for Horses

Description: Most horse owners administer oral deworming medication to their horses on a set schedule, often six times per year. The deworming process involves using a plastic syringe to inject a thick paste into the horse's mouth. Most horse owners do not specifically train their horses to accept this procedure. Consequently, many horses resist the procedure and some horses engage in behaviors, such as head shaking, pulling away, or even rearing, that may be dangerous to humans or to themselves. This study… more
Date: May 2022
Creator: Ward, Jessica Lauren

A Proposal for a Training Program to Support Culturally Responsive Professional-Family Interactions

Description: Behavior analysts often work with families from diverse cultural backgrounds. Ideally, behavior analysts and families interact in ways that are responsive to the family's culture and valued outcomes. The data indicate that most behavior analysts, however, come from one dominant cultural group. This is a proposal for training program and evaluation method to support culturally responsive professional-family interactions. This proposed study is designed to be conducted via Zoom-- a cloud-based vi… more
Date: December 2021
Creator: Anegbeh, Cynthia Momoh
open access

A Preliminary Analysis of the Effects of a Training Program to Teach Skilled Dialogue to a Behavior Analyst Working in a Culturally Diverse Setting

Description: Diversity can serve as both a unifying force as well as grounds for intolerance of differences. Behavior analysts working in applied settings often encounter diversity and it is in these settings that meaningful relationships and harmonious collaboration are vital. Skilled dialogue has been recommended as an approach to capitalizing on diverse perspectives so that new solutions and meaningful relationships are developed. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effects of a training… more
Date: December 2021
Creator: Reese, Ashlee Keisha-Nikol
open access

A Behavior Analytic Account of Humor Responses: Taking a Joke Way Too Seriously

Description: Compared to other examples of human behavior, humor responses have received relatively little attention from the scientific community and by the behavior analytic community in particular. This study investigated what some of the controlling variables for humans to emit a humor response may be. Participants were randomly presented two types of word sequences/jokes: one with a matching punchline and one without a matching punchline. Participants rated whether the jokes were funny or not funny, an… more
Date: December 2021
Creator: Amezquita IV, Edward Brandon
open access

The Correspondence between Receptive and Expressive Task Performances: A Further Analysis of Necessary Conditions

Description: This study was a replication and an extension of the 2021 research performed by Spurgin and Borquez on the correspondence between receptive and expressive behavior. Spurgin examined the role of the echoic in a hear-say procedure with adult learners, while Borquez examined the role of the echoic in both hear-say and see-say procedures. Both studies found that receptive and expressive correspondence did not occur consistently across participants. The present study asked if the fading steps used d… more
Date: December 2021
Creator: Nachawati, Noor

The Effects of a Contingent S-Delta

Description: This thesis attempted a cross-species replication of Bland, et. al., 2018. Human participants went through a computerized, automated shaping procedure that trained them to click on and discriminate between a blue square (SD) and red square (S-delta) on a VR 12 schedule of reinforcement. Three conditions were then presented to the participants consisting of a baseline, punishment, and control condition. In the punishment and control conditions, the SD was replaced by the S-delta or a novel stimu… more
Date: December 2021
Creator: Ochoa, Jules A
open access

Comparing a Hear-Say and See-Say Teaching Procedures during Verbal Behavior Instruction

Description: Establishing effective language intervention for those who struggle to acquire it early on has received significant attention from researchers within the field of behavior analysis. The procedures of the present study were adapted from Spurgin' thesis research from 2021, in which a stimulus specific consequence was used during teaching after participants made correct responses. In this case, the stimulus specific consequence was a label for a picture that participants were required to point to … more
Date: December 2021
Creator: Borquez, Nicholas Paul
open access

A Preliminary Investigation of How to Teach Undergraduate Students How to Build Rapport and Create Meaningful Interactions with College-Aged Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Description: University peer-mentoring programs have shown to increase the retention rates of students, including students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and improved satisfaction with the college experience. The perceived quality of a mentee-mentor relationship may predict satisfaction with a peer-mentoring program; therefore, teaching peer mentors to engage in behaviors that could contribute to a high-quality mentee-mentor relationship may be beneficial. The current study identified target outcomes,… more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Espericueta-Luna, Williams A
open access

The Use of Instructive Feedback to Promote Emergent Verbal Responses: A Replication

Description: Previous research has incorporated instructive feedback (IF) within mastered listener-by-name trials with two children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Participants in a previous study acquired the secondary targets and also demonstrated emergent responding (i.e., listener-by-feature, tact-by-feature, intraverbal, and reverse intraverbal). The current study replicated a previous study on IF with two children with ASD. Therapists conducted a series of three sessions of mastered lis… more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Laddaga Gavidia, Valeria
open access

The Emergence of Receptive and Expressive Language through Stimulus-Specific Consequences

Description: An important question in teaching language is, what accounts for the emergence of either receptive or expressive labels when teaching only one of them? The teaching procedures in the present study were intended to reproduce the natural development of bidirectional naming in which caregivers comment on the items a child is interacting with and children echo those vocalizations they hear. Thus, the only vocalizations presented by the researcher during teaching occurred after the learner pointed t… more
Date: May 2021
Creator: Spurgin, Destiny
open access

Stimulus Equivalence and Competing Behavior: Individual Differences in Accuracy and Reaction Time

Description: The present study investigated how engaging in a behavior that is potentially incompatible with covert verbal behavior, singing aloud, affected the percent of correct responses and reaction time during equivalence tests as compared to engaging in a behavior considered compatible with covert verbal behavior, alternating foot tapping, during testing. Results varied between participants with some participants showing higher accuracies in the incompatible condition and some in the compatible condit… more
Date: May 2021
Creator: Lovitz, Elizabeth
open access

Use of a Virtual Reality Gaming System to Improve Balance in Individuals with Chronic Brain Injury

Description: Wii Fit U games utilize a Wii Balance Board™ (WBB) in a manner that can provide precise feedback contingencies similarly to some forms of balance rehabilitation, thereby potentially increasing the dose of quality therapy with or without the presence of a therapist during post-brain injury rehabilitation. Additionally, an engaging video-game could improve treatment adherence, a critical aspect of making positive functional gains, by potentially increasing the rate and quality of reinforcement em… more
Date: May 2021
Creator: Cruz, Selena R
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