Response variability, a fundamental characteristic of behavior, may be in some cases an induced effect of reinforcement schedules. Research on schedule-induced response variability has shown that continuous reinforcement results in less variability than intermittent reinforcement schedules. Studies on the effects of intermittency of reinforcement,…

Eighteen undergraduates participated in studies designed to examine the factors that produce transfer of contextual functions to novel stimuli in second-order conditional discriminations. In Study 1, participants selected comparison B1 given sample A1 and comparison B2 given sample A2 in a matching-to-sample procedure. Contextual stimuli X1 or X2…

"JEAB"'s first decade featured control of individual behavior by operant contingencies, where the experimenter could interact with a subject in real time and obtain fairly immediate evidence of control, with the possibility of direct extension to applied settings. In subsequent decades, emphasis shifted toward long-term parametric studies with…

The present study examined whether the presentation of stimuli in equivalence relations with consequences increases the operant behavior that produces these consequences. In Experiment 1, both normal words and experimentally trained equivalence stimuli did so with young children. In Experiment 2, results were similar with college students. Here, a…

Following pre-training with everyday objects, 8 children aged from 2 to 4 years learned to produce one manual sign (fists placed one above the other, in front of body) to one stimulus and an alternative manual sign (shoulders touched with ipsilateral hands) to the other stimulus, with each of three pairs of different arbitrary wooden shapes (Set…

This study tested the effects of post-session wheel running on within-session changes in operant responding. Lever-pressing by six rats was reinforced by a food pellet under a continuous reinforcement (CRF) schedule in 30-min sessions. Two different flavored food pellets were used as reinforcers. In the wheel conditions, 30-min operant-sessions…

The purpose of the present experiment was to determine whether repeated cocaine exposure differentially affects sucrose-reinforced operant responding in rats raised in an enriched condition (EC) or an isolated condition (IC). Specifically, the performance of EC and IC rats pressing a lever for sucrose under a high fixed-ratio schedule (FR 30)…

Conditional discrimination is inherent in the intraverbal relation when one verbal stimulus alters the evocative effect of another verbal stimulus and they collectively evoke an intraverbal response. Rarely in research on conditional discriminations have both conditional and discriminative stimuli been vocal verbal and rarely have the responses…

The phenomenon identified as naming is a key stage of language function that is missing in many children with autism and other language delay diagnoses. We identified four children with autism, who, prior to the implementation of this experiment, did not have the naming repertoire (either speaker to listener or listener to speaker) and who had no…

This literature review examines the present level of evidence in support of communication-based treatments for children with autism spectrum disorders. Reviews to date have reported on research published through 2002. The current article included 36 studies published between 2002 and 2007. Best available evidence is presented for seven treatment…

Purchase probability as a function of interpurchase time was examined through comparison of findings from laboratory experiments on reinforcement schedules and from marketing investigations of consumers' interpurchase time. Panel data, based on a sample of 80 consumers who purchased nine supermarket food products during 16 weeks, were used. For…

Two experiments investigated baseline reviews as a relevant variable in reorganization of equivalence classes. After formation of three 4-member classes, participants learned reversals of baseline conditional discriminations and expanded the classes to 5 members each. In Experiment 1, 4 students responded on equivalence probes without baseline…

A mathematical model of operant choice, the generalized matching law was used to analyze play-calling data from the 2004 National Football League season. In all analyses, the relative ratio of passing to rushing plays was examined as a function of the relative ratio of reinforcement, defined as yards gained, from passing versus rushing. Different…

The present article discusses how events outside a subject's skin and not accessible to another subject but to an experimenter may contribute to experimental analyses of private events. Of 16 undergraduates, 8, referred to as instructors, first learned conditional discriminations (i.e., B1C1, B2C2, B3C3, and B4C4) in a standard matching-to-sample…

Major variables related to reinstatement of speech in hospitalized mute and near-mute schizophrenics were isolated and investigated. The study consisted of four parts: (1) verbal conditioning of mute and near-mute chronic schizophrenics using four experimental groups and two control groups, (2) four extra-laboratory measures for testing…