Association for Behavior Analysis International

Behavior analysis began in well-controlled laboratory settings, then branched out to applied settings. Our next domain is the study of everyday life, which can accelerate the development of behavior analytic approaches to all aspects of human life. First, are the personal benefits from understanding and living our own lives better. Second, observations from everyday life suggest ideas for laboratory studies. Clinical work also benefits: Knowledge about the contingencies of natural settings can inform clinicians about the types of interventions most likely to generalize to their subjects everyday lives. Third, teaching behavior principles inspires more enthusiasm when we employ examples from the environments that our students and the public know best, their own lives. Effective, data-based analyses of this nature are a powerful demonstration of the scope of our science. B. F. Skinner was adept in using naturalistic observations; we can build on his example. Fourth, our science promises to improve the human condition, as we show increasing numbers of people how to apply behavior analytic skills to all domains of their lives: relationships, family life, the workplace, etc. By expanding our range of analyses, we make our science more inclusive, and, perhaps, more widely used and valued.

Applied behavior analysiss (ABA) pragmatic, natural science approach to discovering environmental variables that reliably influence socially significant behavior and to developing a technology that takes practical advantage of those discoveries offers humankind our best hope for solving many of our problems. Unfortunately, ABA has had limited impact on society. Using public education as the exemplar, this presentation will explore the question, If ABA is so wonderful, why dont we (society) make greater use of it? Improving the effectiveness of education is one of societys most important problems, and for more than four decades applied behavior analysis has provided powerful demonstrations of how it can promote learning in the classroom. In spite of this evidence, behavior analysis is, at best, a bit player in efforts to reform education. Dr. Heward will identify a dozen reasons why ABA is ideally suited to help improve education, review a somewhat longer list of reasons that work against the widespread adoption of behavioral approaches in education, and suggest some actions that practitioners and researchers can take to enhance and further ABAs contributions to effective education.

Scientific communities rarely embrace new formulations of their subject matters or theories concerning them with enthusiasm. On the contrary, new theories are frequently and sometimes forcefully resisted, the latter peculiar to those touching upon issues of so fundamental a sort as to threaten venerable scientific traditions. Historians note that the eventual adoption of new formulations of events in the sciences is typically preceded by their having first suffered through successive stages of being ignored, dismissed, reviled, ridiculed, distorted, and exploited. Such has been the fate of interbehavioral psychology in the most powerful sector of the behavior analytic community. While it is the case that certain aspects of the behavior analytic position are incompatible with Kantors formulation of psychological events, the threat posed by the adoption of the latter is not as great as might be imagined. Indeed, it is only the most ill-formed and incoherent aspects of the former that are threatened by interbehavioral logic. More importantly, unless behavior analysis strives toward greater scientific systemization, problems of this sort will inevitably resurge, putting the validity and significance of this enterprise at continued risk. Adequate systemization is exemplified in interbehavioral psychology. For these and related reasons, certain assurances and clarifications pertaining to Kantors views are warranted. In addition, many members of the behavior analytic community are wholly unaware of Kantors enormous contribution to the development of a natural philosophy and science of behavior. My aim in this address, thereby, is also to provide an overview of interbehavioral psychology and the philosophy of interbehaviorism for this audience.

Acquired equivalence is an example of emergent stimulus relations, in which stimuli immediately occasion particular behavior or discriminations despite no explicit reinforcement history for doing so. This effect is not reducible to primary stimulus generalization but, rather, develops from common associations shared by these stimuli with other dissimilar stimuli. Sometimes referred to as non-similarity-based categorization, acquired equivalence does not require language. I will describe a number of examples of this phenomenon in non-human animals with special focus on acquired sample equivalence that arises from the common comparison-response relations inherent in many-to-one (or comparison-as-node) matching-to-sample. In addition to showing behavioral manifestations of acquired equivalence, I will discuss how these manifestations might reflect what Hull (1939) called secondary (or mediated) stimulus generalization, the implications of mediated generalization for the notion of emergent relations, and some recent data on what sorts of stimulus events may, or may not, be included in an acquired equivalence class.

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Autism is a complex and heterogeneous disability that is associated with a myriad of serious problems that affect the lives of the diagnosed child as well as family members and others who are close to the child. Such problems include challenging behaviors, family disintegration, isolation, and highly restricted learning opportunities. A number of interventions have been implemented in efforts to prevent or remediate these problems. This presentation will describe several of the most conspicuous problems associated with autism, along with selected prevention strategies that have been validated with experimental data or that seem particularly promising as a result of quasi-experimental findings and clinical experience.