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Music is a unique form of verbal stimuli (Reynolds & Hayes, "The Psychological Record," 67(3), 413-421, 2017) and the literature has indicated some success in using procedures involving the frame of coordination or stimulus equivalence to teach early piano skills to learners with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD; Hill et al., "Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis," 53(1), 188-208, 2020). However, these studies only targeted narrow skills rather than a complete repertoire. Also, whether such teaching procedure is effective for young children with ASD at different ages, with different needs, and with common accompanied diagnosis, is unknown. The current study (a) explored the possibility of applying relational frame theory (RFT; Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001) in piano program development that aims to teach a complete early piano repertoire, and (b) confirmed the effectiveness of an adjusted teaching procedure using the frame of coordination on teaching early piano skills to six young children on the autism spectrum. A multiple probe across participants design was used. After direct training of two relations (AC & AE), post-instructional tests were conducted on eight relations. The results showed that with remedial training, five out of six participants demonstrated mutual entailment, combinatorial entailment, and transformation of stimulus function in these relations. All participants could read and play the song on keyboard without extra training. The study provided practical guidance on applying the procedure to these young learners. Implications of RFT in piano curriculum development were also discussed.

This article explores the integration of culturo-behavior science and contextual behavior science (CBS2) to address global rights violations and promote social change. It emphasizes the role of culture in behavior and the importance of intentional change within sociocultural contexts. The authors argue for collaboration between these perspectives to advance applied research and practice in behavior science. The text also discusses the impact of language and cognition on culturo-behavior science and highlights the significance of relational responding in the development of cultural practices and the spread of propaganda. It concludes by emphasizing the need for a systemic and contextual approach to studying complex social issues and the role of communication in cultural practices. [Extracted from the article]

The 21st century has seen rapid enrollment in online courses and environmental and biological determinates, such as COVID-19, that challenge how universities respond to education. However, this 'new way of doing things' has empirical support from the past. Skinner (1968) laid out a science of teaching derived from operant conditioning principles and provided methods for adopting programmed instruction into what he termed a 'teaching machine.' This series of investigations evaluated the validity of programmed instruction in online courses, as measured by quiz performance, the frequency of discussion posts, instructor time commitment, generalization, and student perceptions of the online modalities used. Results are discussed for the synthesis of programmed instruction and group learning towards a modern teaching machine. Keywords Online education * Teaching machine * Programmed instruction * Automated instruction, Central to a technology of teaching is the role of the instructor. Unlike the Aristotelian and Platonic ideals of the teacher as presenter of instruction, Skinner (1968) emphasized their role [...]

This study compared the effects of a computer-based stimulus equivalence protocol to a traditional lecture format in teaching single-subject experimental design concepts to undergraduate students. Participants were assigned to either an equivalence or a lecture group, and performance on a paper-and-pencil test that targeted relations among the names of experimental designs, design definitions, design graphs, and clinical vignettes was compared. Generalization of responding to novel graphs and novel clinical vignettes, as well as the emergence of a topography-based tact response after selection-based training, were evaluated for the equivalence group. Performance on the paper-and-pencil test following teaching was comparable for participants in the equivalence and lecture groups. All participants in the equivalence group showed generalization to novel graphs, and 6 participants showed generalization to novel clinical vignettes. Three of the 4 participants demonstrated the emergence of a topography-based tact response following training on the stimulus equivalence protocol. (Contains 3 tables and 4 figures.)

The effectiveness of a behavioral skills training (BST) package to teach the implementation of the first three phases of the picture exchange communication system (PECS) was evaluated with 3 adults who had no history teaching any functional communication system. A multiple baseline design across participants was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the training package, which consisted of a video, written and verbal instructions, modeling, rehearsal, and feedback. Results showed significant improvements relative to baseline in a short amount of training time and that skills generalized to a learner with a severe developmental disability. Skills were maintained at 1 month follow-up for 1 participant. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)

One 9-year-old child was taught conditional discriminations between dictated names in Spanish and their corresponding pictures across three stimulus sets while her 10-year-old brother observed. Posttests revealed the emergence of symmetry relations in the form of oral naming skills by both children. (Contains 2 figures.)

The purpose of the current study was to explore the use of overt and covert self-rules in the acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of a chained task by adults with mild developmental disabilities. This research differed from previous research in that the experimenter did not deliver reinforcement for correct responses during training, and we examined the correspondence between each self-rule statement and each subsequent response on each trial. Results showed that the self-rules participated in control over participants' responding, in that the skill was acquired and shown to generalize in the absence of experimenter-delivered reinforcement. Moreover, performance was shown to deteriorate when the emission of overt, but not covert, self-rules was blocked. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate derived manding skills in 2 adults with severe developmental disabilities and language deficits by contriving transitive conditioned establishing operations. Specifically, we evaluated whether a history of reinforced conditional discrimination learning would ultimately result in a derived mand repertoire, in which participants manded for items that were needed to complete chained tasks. After mastering the first three phases of the picture exchange communication system (PECS), participants were taught to mand for the needed items by exchanging pictures of the items for the items themselves. They were then taught to conditionally relate the dictated names of the items to the corresponding pictures of the items and to relate the dictated names to the corresponding printed words. We then tested, in the absence of reinforcement, whether participants would mand for the items needed to complete the chained tasks using text rather than pictures. Both participants showed the emergence of derived mands and some derived stimulus relations as a result of this instruction. Some of the derived relations were shown to be intact at 1-month follow-up, and scores on derived mand probes were higher at follow-up than before training. In addition, the 2 participants vocally requested the needed items on maintenance test probes, a skill that was never trained and was not previously in their repertoires. These results suggest that a history of reinforced relational responding may facilitate the expansion of a number of verbal skills and emphasize the possibility of a synthesis of Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior and derived stimulus relations into language-training efforts for persons with significant disabilities.

Perspective-taking is an ability that requires a child to emit a selection response of informational states in himself or herself and in others. This study used an extended version of the Barnes-Holmes protocol developed in a series of studies by McHugh, Barnes-Holmes, and Barnes-Holmes (2004) to teach typically developing children between the ages of 6-11 perspective-taking skills. The present demonstrational study used a multiple probe design to evaluate the participants' abilities to demonstrate a number of simple and complex relations, and examined both relation type and relational complexity. We also tested for generalization of perspective taking to new stimuli and real-world conversational topics. Results demonstrate that the capacity to alter perspectives can be established by means of a history of reinforced relational responding. (Contains 4 tables and 4 figures.)

This project examined whether a history of reinforced relational responding would result in derived requesting skills in 3 adults with disabilities. Participants were first taught to request preferred items using pictures; they were then taught conditional discriminations between pictures and their dictated names and between dictated names and their corresponding text. Finally, requests for preferred items using corresponding text were evaluated. All 3 participants demonstrated derived requesting skills.

In three experiments, we explore human and simulated participants' potential for deriving and merging analogous forms of stimulus relations. In the first experiment, five human participants were exposed to compound stimuli (stimulus pairs) by way of an automated yes-no protocol. Participants received discrimination training focusing on four three-member stimulus classes, where only two of the four classes were correctly related algebraic expressions. Training was intended to establish generalized identification of novel correct stimulus pairs and generalized identification of novel incorrect stimulus pairs. In Experiment 2, we employed a three-layer connectionist model (CM) of a yes-no protocol aimed at training and testing an analogous set of stimulus relations. Our procedures were aimed at assessing a neural network's ability to simulate derived stimulus relations consistent with the human performances observed in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, we employed a four-layer CM to compute the number of training epochs required to attain mastery. As with our human participants, our neural network required specific training procedures to become proficient in identifying stimuli as being members or nonmembers of specific classes. Outcomes from Experiment 3 suggest that the number of training epochs required to attain mastery for our simulated participants corresponded closely with the number of training trials required of our human participants during Experiment 1. Moreover, generalization tests revealed that human and simulated participants exhibited analogous response patterns. We discuss the evolving potential for CMs to emulate and predict human training requirements for deriving and merging complex stimulus relations during generalization tests. Keywords Mathematical expressions * Connectionist model * Simulated participants * Compound stimuli * Epochs * Generalization tests, In the behavior analytic literature, it is not unusual for applied and basic researchers to describe derived relational responding as a behavioral phenomenon confined to humans with some minimal level [...]

The purpose of the present experiment was to replicate and extend the literature on using selection-based instruction to teach responses to interview questions by (a) evaluating the emergence of recombinative (i.e., combinations of taught) and novel (i.e., untaught) topography-based intraverbal responses, in addition to exact repetitions of taught responses, (b) providing a measure of social validity for the emergent response subtypes, and (c) including a touch-screen video interviewing component. Participants were two young adult males with a learning disability who attended a local vocational development center. Increases in accurate intraverbal responding and decreases in inaccurate responding across most interview questions were observed in both participants at posttest. Increases in the number of accurate recombinative responses were observed for both participants, and increases in accurate exact responses were observed for one participant. One accurate novel response was observed at posttest for each participant. Results suggest that selection-based instruction can generate appropriate topography-based responses that sound unscripted and the addition of a video component was viable.

Recent research has evaluated the utility of teaching potentially covert strategies to mediate overt performance. As an extension of this developing literature, the current study used a multiple-probe design to evaluate the effects of instructing in a visual imagining strategy on correct written spelling responses with three adolescents with various learning disabilities. After the participants were presented with the textual target stimuli, they were instructed to imagine the word in their head before writing it down. All three participants demonstrated improvements in spelling after this instruction, but two of them required additional consequences to meet the mastery criterion.

The stimulus pairing observation procedure (SPOP) combined with multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) has been shown to be effective with typically developing preschoolers in establishing the joint stimulus control required for the development of naming. The purpose of the current investigation was to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the SPOP in establishing speaker and listener responses in children with autism. Participants were presented with pairings of auditory and visual stimuli during instruction. Participants' tacting and listener responses of the visual stimuli were then evaluated during a test phase. MEI with novel pairs of auditory and visual stimuli was conducted if participants did not demonstrate criterion performance on tact and listener probes. SPOP in conjunction with MEI was shown to be effective in establishing some of the tact and listener relations for the three participants. However, accuracy on tact probes was always lower than listener probes. The participant who responded with the highest accuracy on untaught tact and listener probes also displayed echoic responding on the lowest proportion of SPOP instruction and listener test trials.

A multiple probe across participants design was used to assess the effects of an intervention package on reading fluency and section-based and topography-based comprehension tasks. Participants were three adolescents diagnosed with high functioning pervasive developmental disorders. The intervention package consisted of listen passage preview, phrase drill error correction, and performance feedback. Reading fluency for all three participants improved following fluency instruction. Topography-based reading comprehension improved over the course of the study for all three participants. Enhanced fluency performance did not generalize to novel passages. (Contains 3 tables and 3 figures.)

Several studies have demonstrated that conditions can be arranged to promote increases in a nontargeted verbal operant following instruction of another verbal operant. In the current study, we used a multiple baseline design to evaluate the effects of 2 instructional protocols on nontargeted verbal repertoires (listing of synonyms and vocal spelling of these synonyms) in adults with intellectual disabilities. In Experiment 1, participants were instructed in taking dictation and were tested for the vocal spelling of the words taught during instruction. In Experiment 2, participants were taught to match printed words to their printed synonyms and tested for the vocal spelling and listing of synonyms. In both experiments, interventions promoted increases in nontargeted verbal skills.