Search Results

open access

Variability in the Natural World: An Analysis of Variability in Preschool Play

Description: Children acquire many skills through play. These range from fine and gross motor skills, social skills, problem-solving, to even creativity. Creativity or creative engagement is frequently a component in early preschool curricula. A pivotal repertoire to engage in behaviors deemed creative, such as art, storytelling, problem-solving, and the like, is the ability to vary one's responses regardless of the specific repertoire. Researchers have developed methods to produce response variability. How… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Armshaw, Jared T
open access

Cultivating Liberation: The Effects of Collective Shaping on Context and Power Dynamics within Social Justice Narratives

Description: Social issues are becoming increasingly apparent. More people are experiencing the impact of social issues directly and through their media consumption. It is important to understand and reflect on our collective impact on the media and how the media affects the collective. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effects of a collaborative workshop (collective shaping) and a verbal community that examined media depictions of social justice and injustice related to context and power… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Morris, Gabrielle N.
open access

Cultivating Liberation within a Verbal Community: Evaluating the Effects of Collective Shaping on Written Narratives and Reflective Statements about Social Issues

Description: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects that a training workshop and collective shaping had on the reflective statements and feeling and emotion labels in a written response to videos relating to social issues. The workshop included a presentation interspersed with videos to help practice dialoguing and guide discussion toward generating discourse for social change. The effects of the workshop were evaluated using a single subject A – B design with multiple probe measures across t… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Perez Glendon, Emily L
open access

An Evaluation of Effects of Collective Shaping on Perspective Taking and Social Empathy Statements Related to Social Justice

Description: Prejudice establishes coercive contingencies that restrict human rights and diminish quality of life. Social media has made the oppression experienced by individuals more apparent. Perspective taking and empathy can change prejudicial behavior by fostering relationships and encouraging self-identification with those who are different from ourselves. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effects of a guided collective shaping program on the occurrence of perspective taking and emp… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Love, Alexandra K
open access

An Exploration of Cooperation during an Asymmetric Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Game

Description: Researchers investigated how the contingent delivery of a cultural consequence on target culturants in an asymmetric iterated prisoner's dilemma game (IPDG) affected players' choices. The asymmetric IPDG creates an analogue to income disparities created by wage gaps and other cultural practices that create wealth inequalities between different members of the population and allows researchers to explore how these inequalities affect cooperation between players. Six undergraduate students divided… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Lopez, Carlos Ramiro

An In-Depth Look at Community Gardens: Practices that Support Community Garden Longevity

Description: Current food production methods in the United States contribute to environmental degradation as well as food insecurity. Food production by means of community gardens has the potential to reduce the deleterious effects of current production methods. However, many community gardens face challenges that hinder their longevity, thereby reducing the likelihood of the support they might provide for environmentally sustainable food production and decreased food insecurity for community members. A beh… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Cran, Stephanie

Toward an Experimental Analysis of a Competition between Dimensions of Cultural Consequences

Description: The exponential growth of the human population has contributed to the overuse and degradation of common pool resources. Using science as a tool for informed policy-making can improve the management of our common pool resources. Understanding the conditions that influence groups of individuals to make ethical self-controlled choices may help solve problems related to the overuse and degradation of common pool resources. Ethical self-control involves the conflict of choice between one that will b… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Guerrero, Maria Brenda
open access

Finding Out How to Teach the Operant Quadrant: Content and Error Analysis

Description: The goal of this study was to use a nonlinear approach to create a program to teach positive and negative reinforcement and punishment. A specific interest was to determine whether the program and its testing allowed for specific recommendations for future iterations of the program. The tests and program developed for this study were completed by 18 participants. Pre-test and post-test data showed that participants learned the most about positive contingencies, nonexample items, and ambiguous c… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Auzenne, Jessica L
open access

Stimulus Control Effects of Changes in Schedules of Reinforcement

Description: Sometimes, changes in consequences are accompanied by a clear stimulus change explicitly arranged by the experimenter. Other times when new consequences are in effect, there is little or no accompanying stimulus change explicitly arranged by the experimenter. These differences can be seen in the laboratory as multiple (signaled) schedules and mixed (unsignaled) schedules. The current study used college students and a single-subject design to examine the effects of introducing signaled and unsig… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Abdel-Jalil, Awab
open access

What Comes Up? Analyzing Patterns of Resurgence using PORTL

Description: The term "resurgence" generally refers to the reappearance of certain behaviors during extinction. Different definitions describe these behaviors as previously reinforced, previously extinguished, or simply previously learned. At first glance, these definitions seem the same. And, researchers have not given much thought to the differences between them. However, these definitions could refer to different initial teaching procedures, and these differences may produce different results during exti… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Sumner, Sarah
open access

An Evaluation of a Waiting Period and DRL on Reducing Mands serving as Precursors to Self-Injurious Behavior

Description: Extensive research has been conducted demonstrating the utility of differential reinforcement as an effective intervention for self-injurious behavior. However, the majority of this literature requires teaching an alternative response to access reinforcement. Further evaluation of treating self-injurious behavior in individuals that already possess the repertories to contact reinforcement appropriately. Prior to initiating the study, functional assessments were completed for both participant th… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Baak, Sara Ann
open access

Equines Do Not Live for Grass Alone: Teaching Equines with Social Interaction

Description: Most horse training methods heavily rely on negative reinforcement and punishment. However, there is a movement in the horse community to utilize positive reinforcement to meet training goals. Although food has been used effective as a reinforcer with horses, social interaction has also been demonstrated to function as a positive reinforcer for animals. Utilizing social interaction as a reinforcer may lead to several benefits for both the trainer and animal. Some of the benefits can be improved… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Nishimuta, Maasa
open access

The Effects of Instructions on Schedule Sensitivity

Description: There are many situations in which human performances appear insensitive to changing contingencies of reinforcement when compared to nonhuman operant performances. Explanations of these discrepancies have appealed to rule-governance and have provided some evidence that instructions produce these differences by restricting response alternatives as well as functioning as discriminative stimuli for other contingencies. In order to further evaluate these potential functions, a canonical study on ru… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Butcher, Grayson M

A Functional Analysis of Sharing in Preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Description: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate deficits in social behavior which may hinder them from engaging in social interactions. Results of descriptive analyses suggest that children who engage in prosocial behaviors, such as sharing, likely receive social positive reinforcement from peers in the form of attention. However, functional relations between prosocial behaviors, such as sharing, and their maintaining consequences have yet to be identified. Thus, the purpose of this… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Clubb, Courtney
open access

An Evaluation of Effectiveness and Efficiency of Matrix Training Permutations

Description: Recombinative generalization is a generative outcome that involves responding to novel stimulus combinations, and it can be facilitated through an instructional approach called matrix training. A learner's history with constituent stimuli and the arrangement of combination stimuli within the instructional matrix may affect the likelihood of recombinative generalization. To investigate this further, the current project assessed recombinative generalization with novel combinations of abstract sti… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Durham, Rebecca
open access

Encouraging Tolerance of and Cooperation with Dental/Medical Routines

Description: The participant is a 61-year-old woman, diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder and profound intellectual disability who was referred to a behavior-disorders clinic, to increase cooperation with routine dental procedures. I used a behavioral treatment package consisting of stimulus fading, differential reinforcement, and extinction to establish tolerance of, and cooperation with, routine dental procedures. Results showed that cooperative responding varied throughout the progression of tea… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Rawlings, Jordan
open access

The Effects of D.A.N.C.E. Training on Staff Teaching Interactions, Child Goal Responding, and Staff-Child Harmonious Engagement in an Autism Intervention Organization

Description: This study was conducted at a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide responsive, caring, and effective services to children with autism. The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of D.A.N.C.E. training on teaching interactions, harmonious engagement, instructional engagement, and progress on child goals for two early and intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) staff and the children in their care. A multiple baseline design was employed to evaluate the effectiveness of t… more
Date: December 2019
Creator: Tavera, Marlene Lucy
open access

A Shaping Procedure for Introducing Horses to Clipping

Description: The purpose of the current study is to evaluate a procedure that can be used to introduce horses to clipping. Negative reinforcement was used in a shaping paradigm. Shaping steps were conducted by the handler, starting with touching the horse with the hand, then touching the horse with the clippers while they are off, culminating with touching the horse with the clippers while they are on. When a horse broke contact with either the hand or the clippers, the hand or the clippers were held at tha… more
Date: December 2019
Creator: Hardaway, Alison K
open access

Training Behavior Professionals to Use the Interview-Informed Synthesized Contingency Analysis (IISCA): Extension

Description: The current investigation replicated and extended previous research on training of behavior professionals to implement functional assessment and analysis procedures. Specifically, the study extended procedures described by Metras to train board certified behavior analysts (BCBAs) to administer two components of the Interview Informed Synthesized Contingency Analyses (IISCA) by: (1) conducting the study in the context of a large residential/training facility for adults with ID, (2) including a p… more
Date: December 2019
Creator: Markham, Eric Nicholas
open access

Evaluating the Effects of the D.A.N.C.E Training System on Staff and Child Responding

Description: The purpose of this study was to evaluate and systematically replicate the effectiveness of the DANCE training for a staff member to be an effective change agent for the children in her care, while maintaining the organization's and family's values. The study was conducted in an organization that values and focuses on building rapport, avoids the use of coercive procedures, and teaches children in a caring and meaningful way. A multiple baseline across indoor and outdoor settings was used to ev… more
Date: December 2019
Creator: Morales, Erendira
open access

Teaching Children How to Stay Still Using Movies to Provide Continuous Feedback

Description: External beam radiation therapy is often used as a form of treatment for individuals diagnosed with cancer. However, because staying completely still can often be difficult for children, sedation is often used daily to remedy the need for stillness. In this document, we introduce the development, implementation, and testing of a technology designed to teach healthy children to self-monitor and control their movements. This technology monitored a child's body movement and created a continuous fe… more
Date: December 2019
Creator: Otero, Maria Jose
open access

A Behavioral Analysis of the Stroop Effect

Description: Participants demonstrate the Stroop effect when, in naming the color in which a word appears, reaction times are longer when the color and word are incongruent (e.g., "yellow" printed in blue) compared to when they are congruent (e.g., "yellow" printed in yellow). The literature commonly refers to the difference in reaction times as a measure of the interference of word stimuli upon color stimuli, and is taken as support for the theory of automaticity. This study asks whether the Stroop effect … more
Date: August 2019
Creator: Luc, Oanh
open access

A Masking Procedure for Stimulus Control Assessment

Description: The present series of experiments were designed to investigate the utility of the use of a masking system to assess the development of stimulus control. The first experiment compares sample observing time with response accuracy in a match-to-sample task. The second experiment more closely examines this relation by subdividing the sample stimulus mask into four quadrants. The third experiment compares sample observing time during training with accuracy during a subsequent testing condition to de… more
Date: August 2019
Creator: Condon, David
open access

An Evaluation of Problem Behavior during a Preference Assessment

Description: There is a limited amount of research that has evaluated all three types of modalities and consequences during stimulus preference assessments (SPA) or examined problem behavior during preference assessments with individuals with tangible maintained problem behavior. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to extend this line of research in two ways: (a) compare results of SPAs across three modalities and two consequence, (b) evaluate problem behavior during these SPAs with individuals with pr… more
Date: August 2019
Creator: Tinney, Ashton Corinne
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