Association for Behavior Analysis International

Two propositions about behavior seem uncontroversial: (a) all behavior takes time; and (b) all behavior entails choice. The first, because it implies that duration is universal, suggests that all behavior is measurable on the scale of time. The second, which arises from the recognition that every situation allows the occurrence of more than one activity, suggests that all behavior may be viewed as the allocation of time among activities. Every activity is composed of parts that are other activities of lesser time scale and is also a part of an activity on a more extended time scale. The parts of every allocation function together to produce results which accompany or are correlated with the activity. Every activity-part produces such results and contributes to the whole results, which may be greater than the sum of the part-results. The time allocations inherent in activities are shaped by phylogenetically important events (PIEs), both as results and as inducers of behavior. An activity is defined by its results, the job it gets done. Results at different time scales sometimes conflict with one another, in the sense that local results may be higher or lower in value than extended results. These conflicts lead either to impulsiveness or self-control, depending on whether the resolution favors local or extended control. This molar view allows us to re-cast many familiar concepts, such as reinforcement, punishment, stimulus control, and verbal behavior.

These studies compare the relative effectiveness of different procedures to improve the intraverbal repertoire in children with autism. The first study, Multiple Intraverbal Responses: Quick Transfer from Tact-Intraverbal versus Repeated Tacting, compares two methods for establishing multiple responses to an intraverbal category by feature or function. This single subject study utilized an alternating treatment design to evaluate the relative effectiveness of immediate transfer from tact to intraverbal category versus repeated and changing tacting when provided category in establishing multiple and varied responses. The second study, Increasing Multiple Responses to Intraverbal Categories, further explored the relative effectiveness of teaching tacting of category when presented with a picture as a prerequisite to multi-response intraverbal by class. This single subject study also utilized an alternating treatment design to determine if teaching the tact of class would result in more rapid acquisition of skills or enhance variety. The last study, A Comparison of Sign and Echoic Prompts on the Acquisition of Intraverbal Fill-Ins evaluated the relative effectiveness of two procedures to establish intraverbal fill-ins in a child with autism.

The initiation of social interaction is a critical skill for developing relationships and successful community participation. The failure to easily acquire or readily demonstrate this skill or impairments in development of such skills is one of the diagnostic characteristics of children with developmental disabilities and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This symposium will review three empirical studies designed to promote social initiation and sustained interaction in public school classrooms and residential settings. Each study used a different procedure to support the establishment of initiation and maintain social interactions. A common component of each of the three studies was the use of modeling procedures to establish initiation and an evaluation of the effects on peers. Additionally, the data from the three studies suggest that the acquisition of social behavior is not necessarily correlated with demonstration of social skill.

Previous research suggests that there is a relation between accurate treatment implementation and student performance. As a result, the identification of behavioral techniques that promote accurate treatment implementation in clinical settings is of critical importance. The purpose of the present symposium is to share findings from three studies that examined ways to improve staff performance and teaching skills through the application of behavioral interventions used with staff.

Interventions for communication development are of critical importance for children with autism due to their characteristic deficits in language. To date, the only AAC intervention that has been empirically investigated with persons with autism is the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) (Charlop-Christy, Carpenter, Le, LeBlanc, & Kellet, 2002). The research presented in this symposium addresses further advances in AAC research. The first presentation examines the degree to which children with autism generalize PECS use to natural settings, including a playroom, their home, and the community. The second presentation extends previous research by assessing the relationship between PECS training and increases in verbalizations across generalized settings. The final presentation extends the research on designing an augmentative and alternative communication intervention by incorporating visually-based strategies and addressing the socio-communicative deficits in persons with autism. The communication intervention uses recent advancements in technology and assesses impact on acquisition rates, social acceptance, and generalization across environments.

The Center for Autism and Related Disorders, Inc. (CARD) is an organization which provides comprehensive behavior analytic services to individuals with diagnoses on the autism spectrum. The purpose of this symposium is to describe our general service model for early intensive behavioral intervention, describe our intervention programs targeted at teaching higher order skills such as those deemed executive functioning and social cognition, describe our Specialized Outpatient Services program, and describe our ongoing programs of research. The international reach of CARD services and ongoing career development opportunities will be discussed.

The papers in this symposium cover a number of interesting topics related to behavior analytic intervention for food selectivity. The first presentation will show data comparing the use of simultaneous versus sequential presentation in the treatment of food selectivity and their effects on generalization and maintenance. From this presentation, attendees will learn which intervention appeared most promising. The second presentation will show results of a component analysis of differential reinforcement and nonremoval of the spoon when used in isolation and combined during a treatment involving a paired-choice presentation of foods. From this presentation, attendees will learn about a possible intervention that can be used for children wherein choices may facilitate compliance and what components of the intervention appeared to be most necessary for the participant in this evaluation. The third presentation will show data from a case study wherein a childs progression through treatment is outlined. Interventions evaluated include differential reinforcement, escape extinction, demand fading, and high-probability/low-probability. From this presentation, attendees will see the progression of treatment of food selectivity in the real world and be supplied with one example of the clinical obstacles and considerations that are commonly encountered.

Many children in the child welfare system develop the symptoms of childhood psychiatric disorders, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, bipolar disorder and reactive attachment disorder due to early abuse/neglect, multiple placements and multiple caregivers. Often, the treatment focus follows the medical model with the assumption that behavioral symptoms are the result of underlying psychopathology. Behavior analysts are in a unique position to provide more comprehensive diagnosis that includes observations of behavior in a variety of settings to determine the effect of various stimulus conditions and setting events, functional assessments to determine the causes and maintainers of various behavioral symptoms, and careful analysis of learning histories to determine the efficacy of various reinforcers and punishers. Behavior analysts are also able to provide assessment-driven treatment approaches, to design therapeutic environments that support the learning of appropriate replacement behaviors and to facilitate typical development rather than psychopathology. However, the system within which they work is set up to provide therapy or counseling to these children which sometimes is at odds with what behavior analysts do. This symposium will address the issue of how behavior analysts can work within the existing system to provide for these childrens needs.

Floridas Behavior Analysis Services Program (BASP) is a statewide program for dependent children and their caregivers. This symposium will discuss the overall components of the BASP program, the structure of the program, and data on parent training and related measures. Two presentations will focus on organizational components of the program to include behavior analyst time allocation, overall service allocation, historical data, and expansion efforts. New training initiatives will also be discussed along with data to support program continuation. The remaining two presentations will describe results from caregivers who attended a group class and also received in-home coaching. Related measures, including stress and depression, were also collected from caregivers. Results indicated that caregivers improved significantly on posttests and also showed increases in positive interactions and tool use after training and in-home coaching. Data collected on child behavior showed decreases in junk/annoying age typical behavior and more serious behaviors after both classroom training and in-home coaching. Average stress measures on the Parenting Stress Index decreased by one standard deviation while depression levels decreased slightly.

This collection of papers highlights the vital role of parental involvement in the early intervention autism treatment team. Emphasis is placed on collaboration between parents and professionals to maximize on treatment gains through naturally occurring developmental processes across settings.

This symposium will address different programmatic questions in stimulus control research. One question is whether matching-to-sample is the only procedure that can be used to train conditional relations and to test for the emergence of equivalence relations. The first paper provides an alternative to matching-to-sample procedures with arbitrary stimuli and typical adults as well as procedures using more contextually relevant stimuli with a student with learning delays. The second paper investigates if establishing equivalent stimulus classes among words that have the same grammatical function in written Portuguese would facilitate ordinal function transfer through the equivalence classes, according to written Portuguese grammatical rules involving words ordinance. A third paper will discuss the process of transforming findings from stimulus equivalence research into applied protocols that can be used to successfully teach children with special needs.

Behavior Analysis is applied most widely with individuals with developmental disabilities and those receiving specialized services. The papers in this symposium provide examples of the application of behavior analysis to address challenges encountered with children served in early and general education settings. Participants include typically developing infants, preschoolers, kindergarteners, and children served in general education classrooms. Interventions include prompting, reinforcement, and extinction and are designed to improve social, academic, and language skills among the participants. Collectively, the data will inform the audience regarding (a) scheduling of teaching trials, (b) the benefit of combining intervention components, (c) procedures useful in identifying reinforcers, and (d) the potential benefits of operant approaches to clinical phenomena. Together, these papers will illustrate the manner in which behavior analysis can be applied to improve our approach to teaching and intervening with children in early and general education settings.

Affiliated chapters are organizations associated with the Association of Behavior Analysis International, whose mission involves the dissemination and growth of behavior analysis. Recently, there has been an increase in the number of chapters that have been established in the United Statesover a third of all U.S. ABA Affiliate Chapters were established within the past 4 years. The purpose of this panel discussion is to review the history of several successful ABA affiliate chapters, and review how each organization is structured, what the goals are, and what the chapters have done to increase membership in their organizations. In addition, panelists will review how they have organized and improved the quality of their respective conferences. Individuals from several affiliate chapters will participate, including the Berkshire Association for Behavior Analysis and Therapy (BABAT), the Maryland Association for Behavior Analysis (MABA), the California Association for Behavior Analysis (CalABA), and the Connecticut Association for Behavior Analysis (CTABA).

Behavior Analysis has its origins within psychology. As the field has matured and the evidence supporting behavioral techniques has accumulated, the use of behavioral techniques has spread to other disciplines and the demand for services has dramatically increased. This led to the development of standards and procedures to certify that individuals have the training necessary to provide competent services. Like many other professions, psychologists may be licensed to provide services to the public. While these licenses are issued by the states, the American Psychological Association developed and periodically updated a Model Licensing Act to serve as a guide for state licensing laws. This Model Licensing Act has long included behavior analysis as part of the practice of psychology to be included in state licensing laws. Licensed psychologists may not be certified to practice behavior analysis, and individuals who are certified to provide behavior analytic services may not be either licensed or psychologists. Is there any conflict between certification and licensure and between behavior analysis and the Model Licensing Act? The panel will discuss certification, state licensure and the APA Model Licensing Act as they relate to the practice of behavior analysis by certified behavior analysts and by licensed psychologists.

Adolescents with autism can present a special set of behavioral challenges. This talk will focus on the application of effective educational and treatment strategies, methods and skills building approaches to help adolescents and their parents and caregivers not only deal with autism but puberty as well. Some of the areas covered include aggression, masturbation, inappropriate touching, toilet training, social skills, and problem solving skills. The discussion also will include how antecedent planning can reduce confrontations and escape motivated behavior.

A growing body of research supports behavior analytic approaches to the development of expertise in sports/athletics. In his 2007 Presidential Scholars Address at ABA, K. Anders Ericsson bridged his largely cognitive approach to the development of elite-level performance with an operant approach. Research on Ericssons model of deliberate practice applied to sports, combined with investigations of athletic performance in the behavior analysis literature, have expanded the basis for which innovative research may emerge. The first paper in this symposium reviews this research and offers directions for future research. The second paper presents just such an innovative investigation, the application of functional analysis methodology to the data-based assessment of reinforcement contingencies for individual high school football players. Similarly, the third paper presents the results of an intervention in which high school football coaches utilized traditional observation versus the use of conditional probability data to determine defensive plays.

Applied behavior analysis is often characterized as data driven. Data are only as valid as the instruments that produce the data. This symposium presents data-based information about characteristics of measures often used in ABA research and intervention in the area of autism. The first presentation examines several of the most commonly used measures of language in children with autism. How these measures compare to each other and the implications for reporting and interpreting scores from these measures is presented. The second presentation offers findings from a relatively large sample group comparison study concerning the utility of a low-cost, widely used behavior report measure (CBCL) as a screening tool for more efficiently identifying children who could benefit from ABA intervention. The third presentation provides data from a large sample of children with autism who were administered a Weschler Intelligence Scale prior to beginning ABA treatment. Normative data by age group are presented and a case is made for using population specific norms when reporting and interpreting intelligence scores for children with autism. Together, these presentations give significant new information relevant to research and treatment in the area of ABA for children with autism.

Behavior analysts consulting in public school settings are often challenged by the behavior of consultees and other service providers and must find ways to teach and engage individuals who may not be optimally receptive to the consultation process. In a related vein, consultees may lack the resources or supports to follow through. Many consultees may fail to adequately recognize the importance of data collection, may not effectively supervise paraprofessionals, and may not adequately assume responsibility for thoroughly evaluating a students progress or program placement. Time, energy, and information is lost when systems are not in place to support consultation. This panel will focus on providing ABA consultation with educational settings that have not consistently employed ABA methods. We will discuss common consultation challenges and strategies designed to shape the performance of staff and improve accountability. This panel topic is relevant to educators, clinicians, administrators, parents of school-age children and all service providers.

Providing effective, quality intervention to children with autism and related disabilities requires a very comprehensive approach. It is well recognized that it is not only what we teach our learners, but how we teach them that makes a meaningful difference. When a systematic plan for building and maintaining relationships between children with autism and their teachers is implemented, students are more likely to trust their teachers not only in what they are teaching, but also in how they are teaching. This symposium will discuss the importance of building rapport with our learners, teaching our learners to advocate for themselves, and assessing therapists teaching interactions in different instructional arrangements.

In this symposium we present recent research findings regarding the assessment and treatment of challenging behavior for individuals with autism and developmental disabilities. The symposium consists of four papers from major university-affiliated research and treatment centers. In the first presentation researchers from Vanderbilt University will summarize the findings regarding assessment and treatment from their recently-established outpatient clinics. The second and third presentations will be from the University of Minnesota and the University of Texas and will provide recent findings on the influence of motivating operations on both the assessment and treatment of challenging behavior. Finally, researchers from the University of Idaho will tackle the controversial topic of sensory integration and provide functional assessment data on the use of weighted vests in the treatment of self-injury.

Parent education programs for parents of children with autism often focus on teaching parents to remedy the social and communicative deficits of their children. Recently, researchers have begun to investigate the unique contributions that parents can make in treatment choices, such as selecting behavioral excesses and deficits that are important targets with maximal effect. In these studies, parents and clinicians worked collaboratively to develop, implement, and evaluate interventions. In the first presentation, a parent education program was designed to teach parents to address complex problem behaviors in the home. The second presentation discusses the effects of this collaborative parent education program on the family (e.g., parent stress, quality of life). In the final presentation, parents were taught to evaluate and compare the interventions that their child received. These parent education programs will be discussed in terms of the importance of developing programs that are appropriate for individual families needs and the potential to increase parent empowerment.

Shaping the applied repertoires of our students requires sensitivity to both the shaping of specified and non-specified response classes. We want our students to be able to attend to raw data, discriminate relevant functional units, and intervene effectively. Shaping the repertoires of clinical students in psychotherapy, and of behavior analysis students in applied settings, requires that the supervisor shape both topographically specified and non-specified responses. This panel will search for commonalities across traditional clinical supervision and supervision in traditional applied behavior analytic settings.

Everyone leaves a body of work that can be helpful to future researchers. Beginning with an analysis of the work of Tom Gilbert, his Performance Matrix, its relevance to an ideal archive, and the contributions of library science, this presentation looks in detail at the strategic and tactical processes of organizing the archives of Gilbert, Barrett, and Lindsley. Additional examples and helpful hints come from a professional archivist from the Archives of the History of Psychology. It is the intent of these presentations to offer advice and direction to those interested in preserving their work and the work of others.

The symposium presents three cases of students referred in public schools for emotional problems resulting in a lack of sustained curriculum engagement. Additionally, these students exhibited challenging behaviors considered to be disruptive to the overall learning environment. All students were served in typical elementary schools and scored with in the average to above average range on standardized IQ tests. Traditionally, these types of cases were referred to a school counselor or psychologist for psychodynamic treatment. The symposium presents the applied findings and impact of behavior analysts designing interventions for behaviors defined as emotional.

This symposium in designed to show the effects of Behavior Systems Analysis and Organizational Behavior Management on improving staff and client behavior in health care and human service settings. Pinpointing areas that need improvement and using the principles of behavior to design and evaluate interventions to address these areas has been shown to produce substantial improvements in these systems. We wish to outline some current work demonstrating these improvements.

Correspondence relations play a key role in everyday verbal functioning. Describing a weekend outing, classifying a musical piece, categorizing a type of insect, and interpreting a behavioral episode all involve correspondence between a verbal response and some aspect of the world. Such correspondence relations lie at the heart of Skinners analysis of the tact, defined as a verbal response evoked by some event or property of some event, maintained by generalized reinforcement (e.g., social approval). The degree to which a tact truly or accurately reflects some event depends on its correspondence with the contingencies, and can range from high (when contingencies permit precise tacting) to low (when contingencies arranged for tacting are weak or detective, or when special interests of the speaker intrude). Accuracy and truth are therefore products of contingencies arranged by verbal communities which place a premium on correspondence. This is of more than idle theoretical interest. Correspondence relations bear on distinctions between facts and opinions, and more generally, to differences between scientific and pseudoscientific claims. In this presentation, I will discuss some general areas of research relevant to distorted tacts, the conditions under which people are especially prone to their disruptive influences, and how such relations can be studied with traditional behavioral methods. Some implications for scientific accuracy, and for distinguishing science from pseudoscience, will also be considered.

Designed to provide the attendee with useful information in the form of field-tested behavioral techniques, an understanding of the behavioral principles being used, socially valid statements, positive anecdotal reports, and data-based results. This symposium will address several of the real-time applications that have been used by a private agency while providing behavioral and educational consultation services to public school districts in California. The symposium will consist of two presentations. The first being a detailed description of the techniques, successes and challenges faced when implementing Brief Functional Analyses for young children. The second being a detailed description of creating, implementing and monitoring a daily data recording and feedback system for adolescent-aged students.

There has been an escalation in the number of children identified with autism spectrum disorders in recent years. To increase the likelihood that treatments for the children be effective, interventions should be derived from sound theory and research evidence. Absent this supportive foundation, intervention programs could be inconsequential if not harmful to children. Although atypical, the development of children with autism should be considered initially from the perspective of the same variables that affect the development of typical children. In addition, the developmental deviations that characterize autism must be considered when developing intervention programs. Behavioral systems models describe both typical as well as atypical development, and emphasize dynamic multidirectional person-environment transactions. The environment is viewed as having multiple levels, from the individuals with autism, themselves, to larger societal and cultural levels. Behavioral systems models of human development can be generalized to a transactional systems model of services for children with autism. This model is the foundational theoretical position of the Southern Illinois University Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders. The Centers programs are described to illustrate the application of the model to multiple levels of the social ecology.

Staff and parent training in autism early intensive intervention is paramount to successful outcomes. Presentation 1 reports on the evaluation (multiple baseline design) of a package to rapidly train instructors to implement discrete-trials teaching with children with autism. Self-instruction (manual) and feedback plus demonstration resulted in marked performance improvement in training and generalization. Interobserver agreement, treatment integrity, and social validity were very high. Presentation 2 reports on procedures to promote one familys independence and maintenance of gains upon transition out of intensive intervention. A consumer-reference task analysis was made and staff implemented the tasks first, and subsequently transferred therapy procedures to parents. Generality of results will be reported with a larger group. Presentation 3 reports on an organizational feedback system to increase the level of clinical goals met by parents of children in intensive home-based intervention (24 families) 24-hours-a-day and 7-days-a-week. Various methods of parent training and involvement were implemented and a comparison of feedback with individual parent data and feedback with group data on parent attainment of treatment goals will be presented, as well as results on parent participation and child outcome measures, indicating feedback itself was important to the outcomes, and that children succeeded with various outcome measures.

Direct observational data recording methods are utilized widely in ABA instructional settings, and interval sampling methods such as partial interval recording (PIR) and momentary time sampling (MTS) are commonly used when behavior occurs at high frequencies and/or have ambiguity in their onset and offset. Gardenier, MacDonald, and Green (2004) compared the use of PIR and MTS in data collection for stereotypy exhibited by children with autism in an assessment setting, and found that MTS often produced a more accurate measure of the true occurrence of stereotypy than did PIR. To replicate and extend this finding, we conducted a series of studies to further assess the accuracy of MTS and PIR measurement for collecting data on stereotypy, and also to evaluate the application of these data collection methods to the classroom setting. Understanding that a careful balance of accuracy and applicability is desirable for the selection of a data collection method, these studies, taken together, inform the selection and implementation of data collection methods in the classroom setting.

Positive behavior analytic approaches are typically implemented to increase desirable behavior. The studies reviewed in this symposium will address the question "What influence do positive behavior analytic approaches have on problem behaviors?" In the first study the rate of problem behaviors displayed by adolescent students with developmental disabilities was monitored in a classroom when antecedent procedures and public posting were used to facilitate teacher consistency in implementing student positive reinforcement programs. The second study evaluated rates of attempted pica in three adolescent students with developmental disabilities when non-contingent reinforcement intervals were varied. The third study varied selected characteristics of attention as consequences for problem behaviors displayed by students with developmental disabilities, based on the results of functional analyses of the relative reinforcing value of various characteristics of attention for specific problem behaviors, demonstrating a relationship between the identified characteristics of attention and the rates of the problem behaviors displayed. Implications for use of restrictive or aversive procedures to reduce or eliminate problem behaviors and suggestions for other positive programming procedures that may enhance the current strategies for reducing problem behaviors will be discussed.

Computer and video technology use is increasing in almost every industry world-wide to improve performance and increase the effectiveness and efficiency of services. The utilization of technology in applied behavior analysis is also on the rise (Jackson & Dixon, 2007). The first presentation will illustrate the use of a computerized hand-held device (pocket PC) to collect data during behavioral treatment and assessment sessions in a psychiatric setting. The second presentation will illustrate the utilization of video training to increase staff positive interaction behaviors, as well as increase the productive involvement of participants with developmental disabilities. The final presentation will describe a series of computer programs for handheld and desktop computers that have been developed to advance data collection and service delivery for a school servicing children with Autism. Benefits and challenges of these technology applications will be discussed.

Behavior Analysis provides an effective and efficient means of increasing the success of learners in a variety of settings. Despite strong empirical support for a principled approach to arranging learning and the demonstrated effectiveness of many specific programs and procedures, Behavior Analysis is not a first choice intervention in many contexts. Even in the treatment of individuals with autism where it has enjoyed noteworthy popular and scientific acclaim, practitioners are repeatedly challenged to defend its use. Factors that will increase the wide scale acceptance of Behavior Analysis will be discussed.

Although 30 years of research on the effectiveness of active student responding on student achievement and behavior exists for students in grades K-12, there are a limited number of empirical, peer-reviewed studies that address active student responding with post secondary students. This symposium will present the results of three studies on active student responding weve conducted in our classrooms. The first two studies involved the use of electronic guided notes vs. paper guided notes, and electronic response systems vs. single student responding on next class quizzes and application assignments. The third study involved the effects of SAFMEDS of on students discrimination of terms in ABA and on response generality and long-term maintenance of behavior.