Notes

Operant Conditioning
Responding is conditioned through manipulation of consequences according to the law of effect.
Three-Term Contingency
Behavior is explained by analyzing it according to the antecedent stimuli and the consequences that follow; i.e., antecedent - behavior - consequence.
Operant Consequences
Close Reinforcers
Desired consequences that result in repetition of the behavior that led to them.
Close Punishers
Undesirable consequences that result in decreases in the behavior that led to them
Reinforcer
Stimulus change that follows a behavioral response and increases the likelihood that response will occur again (strengthens the behavior).
Punisher
Stimulus change that follows a behavioral response and decreases the likelihood of the response recurring (weakens the behavior).
Operant
The basic unit of behavior
Radical Behaviorism
School of behaviorism that views behavior as a natural event resulting exclusively from interactions with the environment.

To Sundberg authored or co-authored the two most frequently used verbal behavior assessments on the market today. That is the VB MAPP and the abels. Both of them look at young children's ability to make requests to label items conversational skills. They also look at imitation and those earlier forms of behavior that are necessary before the person can begin to use real words. We also talked about the importance of stimulus equivalence, and so there are some matching components of both of those assessments. And there's also components to assess the child's ability to engage in good listener skills. Both of them go on to look at some beginning academics in terms of reading and writing and functional living skills that doubles as a bit more of than the vb mat. When we move on into skills assessment, we will talk more in detail about these instruments.
Functional Communication Training
A differential reinforcement technique that teaches the person to engage in communicative responses as a replacement for problem behavior.

We've not yet discussed the different methods of teaching, but functional communication training is conducted using differential reinforcement, which means you provide reinforcement for the behaviors you want to see and you do not provide reinforcement for the behaviors you do not want to see. And in functional communication training, what is happening is the person is being reinforced using airless teaching for communication training. And since these behaviors do not already exist in the person's behavioral repertoire, they are taught this in a hand over hand methodology to begin with. So it's obviously not beginning with a vocal response. It's beginning by having the person usually touch a picture symbol, something that can be completed with assistance. And then over time, that behavior is shaped up to use vocal responding or multiple picture symbols, gestures, whatever mode of communication, the person is going to use per.

Kathleen Piazza is best known for her work in feeding therapy, many children with autism and related disorders are very finicky eaters, and this can cause health problems for them and for those who have the most significant struggles in this area. There are clinics where parents can take the children for feeding therapies to behavior. Analytic clinics for this purpose are pretty well known. One is at the Monroe Mayer Institute in Nebraska, where Kathleen Piazza heads it up. So let's take a look at her work.

Dixon is kind of a rare combination of he's an act guy, and he's also got some expertise in autism and services for people with autism. And he has actually developed a popular new assessment called the peak and the peak is designed to assess higher order language and cognitive skills. So kind of overlaps with the VB MAPP at the lower levels, but then it extends beyond that, looking at other forms of language. So in the next screen, we'll talk about it a little bit of the research on its more complex verbal behaviors that is coming out of the peak studies.

Greg Hanley Henley is a guy who works extensively with problem behavior and functional communication training, but he wanted to find a way to make functional analysis more portable and more easily implemented in various types of settings. So he developed something called the iSCSI interview informed synthesize contingency analysis. A lot of words to remember, but iSCSI is the short form of that. He's also worked to try to make some of the training procedures more tolerable so they can be done outside laboratory settings. So if you'll take a look at the next page, we'll look at one example of that with delay tolerance.

Delay/Denial Tolerance
A component of functional communication training that teaches the learner to first accept delays in receiving requested items/activities, then to accept denials, without displaying problem behavior.