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Adventitious Reinforcement of Maladaptive Stimulus Control Interferes with Learning

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Abstract

Persistent error patterns sometimes develop when teaching new discriminations. These patterns can be adventitiously reinforced, especially during long periods of chance-level responding (including baseline). Such behaviors can interfere with learning a new discrimination. They can also disrupt already learned discriminations, if they re-emerge during teaching procedures that generate errors. We present an example of this process. Our goal was to teach a boy with intellectual disabilities to touch one of two shapes on a computer screen (in technical terms, a simple simultaneous discrimination). We used a size-fading procedure. The correct stimulus was at full size, and the incorrect-stimulus size increased in increments of 10 %. Performance was nearly error free up to and including 60 % of full size. In a probe session with the incorrect stimulus at full size, however, accuracy plummeted. Also, a pattern of switching between choices, which apparently had been established in classroom instruction, re-emerged. The switching pattern interfered with already-learned discriminations. Despite having previously mastered a fading step with the incorrect stimulus up to 60 %, we were unable to maintain consistently high accuracy beyond 20 % of full size. We refined the teaching program such that fading was done in smaller steps (5 %), and decisions to “step back” to a smaller incorrect stimulus were made after every 5—instead of 20—trials. Errors were rare, switching behavior stopped, and he mastered the discrimination. This is a practical example of the importance of designing instruction that prevents adventitious reinforcement of maladaptive discriminated response patterns by reducing errors during acquisition.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant no. P01HD055456 and center grants P30 HD002528 and P30 DC005803 to the University of Kansas. We appreciate the support of the Parsons State Hospital and Training Center. We also thank Carol Cummings, Carlos Sanchez, and Sarah Hall for their assistance in collecting and analyzing data. Address correspondence to Kate Saunders (ksaunders@ku.edu) or Dean Williams (deanwms@ku.edu).

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Correspondence to Kathryn J. Saunders.

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This research was funded by grant no. P01HD055456 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the University of Kansas.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This work was approved by the University of Kansas Institutional Review Board.

Animal Welfare

This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Written informed consent and behavioral/verbal assent were obtained from all individual participants included in the study. Because the participant was not capable of giving written informed consent, the parents or legal guardian provided written consent, and the participant provided verbal and behavioral assent.

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Saunders, K.J., Hine, K., Hayashi, Y. et al. Adventitious Reinforcement of Maladaptive Stimulus Control Interferes with Learning. Behav Analysis Practice 9, 223–229 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-016-0131-2

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