Association for Behavior Analysis International

Participants are welcome to come enjoy a yoga and Pilates workout led by certified instructors. There is no experience necessary to participate in this moderate exercise session. Wear comfortable clothes and bring a towel or mat. You will strengthen and stretch tired conference muscles. This event is held in partnership with the Health, Sports and Fitness SIG.

At the special interest group (SIG) leadership training, learn strategies for building and growing vibrant SIGs. Network and brainstorm with other leaders—from SIGs of all sizes, types, and locations. Christy Alligood, of the Applied Animal Behavior SIG, will make a presentation on “Legal and Financial Aspects of SIG Management,” describing the benefits of formally incorporating your SIG as a nonprofit organization, and will detail the steps and tools needed to establish your SIG legally and financially. Joshua K. Pritchard, of the Dissemination of Behavior Analysis SIG will present “Policies and Procedures for Ensuring Organized Succession Planning: Learning From Our Mistakes.” This presentation will provide some important techniques to ensure institutional memory, codify important aspects of your SIG and create the foundation for a successful organization gleaned from mis-steps, hiccoughs, and a few successes over the course of a SIG’s development.

Training will conclude with presenter/audience beakout sessions. Join Drs. Alligood or Pritchard in moderated discussions on the development strategies outlined in their presentations.
Although the training is free for up to three officers per SIG, advance registration is required.

This event is closed; attendance is by invitation only.

Parents and other caregivers of individuals with special needs as well as professionals and students are attending the ABAI convention in increasing numbers but may have questions about how to make the most of the experience. Furthermore, an event as large as ABAI may seem overwhelming to newcomers. Parents, professionals and students who may be attending ABAI for the first time are encouraged to participate in this convention orientation and visit our

website. We will provide an overview of ABAI and its convention and highlight the types of events that parents, professionals and students will encounter.

The Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI) has been in existence for 39 years. In the last 20 years, the field has diversified its scientific undertakings and has experienced accelerated demand for behavior-analysis services across various domains, most notably autism treatment. ABAI has adjusted to these demands, while growing at a rapid rate: In the last 20 years, membership has grown from 2,412 to 6,411 (266%); registration at the annual convention, from 2,894 to 4,543 (157%); chapters, from 31 to 75 (245%); and special interest groups, from 20 to 34 (170%). While adjusting to external demands, ABAI has offered a variety of specialized events, increased the number of its publications, and offered diverse new services—all highly rated by our members. During this period, ABAI has also developed a solid infrastructure that grew from 2 to more than 20 regular employees and nearly 40 seasonal staff, developed an elaborate and effective technical and process infrastructure, and acquired its own headquarters. I will share an inside perspective on the major challenges we have faced and accomplishments we have achieved in ABAI’s recent evolution and also the opportunities that lie ahead for the association and the discipline.

The first conference presentations about the Picture Exchange Communication System--PECS--were presented in the late 1980s. The first publication about PECS described its initial use in a behaviorally oriented program in Peru. Since that time, hundreds of thousands people have attended workshops on PECS and the Pyramid Approach to Education around the world. The effective implementation of PECS requires the application of many strategies developed within the area of broad spectrum behavior analysis. The popularity of PECS has helped attract large numbers of professionals (and family members) outside of the field of behavior analysis and has offered them a functional perspective on language development and a host of teaching issues. Citations of key research and review articles support its appeal. The PECS Manual has a circulation of over 300,000 copies in ten languages supported by Pyramid consultant teams in a dozen countries. Workshops, consultation and products developed by Pyramid Educational Consultants, Inc. have introduced the relevance of not only focusing on observable behavior but also on the issue of behavior under what conditions. In this way, the strategies required to teach functional communication has been promoted as not only relevant to picture-based systems but to all communication modalities, and indeed, to all types of lessons.

Behavior analysis could be much more successful than it has been in dealing with many of the most pressing issues that beset contemporary society. Governments across the globe are now seeking behavior change solutions to prevent costly health, social, financial, and environmental problems. This presents great opportunities for behavior analysts to demonstrate that they have the knowledge and skills to change society for the better. Our research can be seen as an attempt to do just that. We chose the biggest public health problem of our time—obesity—and set about devising an intervention that incorporated a range of behavioral principles. The resultant program is known as the Food Dudes, and it has been uniquely successful in bringing about large and long-lasting changes in the eating habits of 2–11-year-olds and their parents. It has been adopted by the Irish government for all primary schools, and more than 300,000 children and their families have participated so far. It is now being rolled out to regions in England, initially to 50,000 children. Successful pilots have also been conducted in the USA and Italy. Recognition has come from various quarters, including the World Health Organization, which gave us an award for combating obesity; we also recently won the Chief Medical Officer’s Gold Medal Award in the UK.

The Department of Behavior Analysis at the University of North Texas has established a long tradition of leadership in teaching, service, and scholarship of behavior analysis. Its forerunner, the Center for Behavioral Studies, began in 1971 offering practicum training for UNT students through its Autism Treatment Center, its Behavior Contracting Service and its Behavior Exchange Clinic. It morphed into the Center for Behavior Analysis in 1983 when courses in behavior analysis were first introduced on the UNT campus. In 1993, it became the nation’s first stand-alone Department of Behavior Analysis, thereby initiating a long line of firsts: the first graduate program accredited by the Association for Behavior Analysis, the first undergraduate degree in Applied Behavior Analysis, and the first online program to provide coursework required for professionals seeking certification by the Behavior Analysis Certification Board. Along with these “firsts,” the department has enjoyed a longstanding reputation for excellence for its work in autism and related disabilities, basic human operant research, behavior and cultural analysis, applied behavior analysis with animals, and more. The department’s stellar Master of Science program has attracted students from all across the United States as well as the U.K., Iceland, Norway, Japan, Colombia, and Brazil, to name a few. Accreditation reviews of the program have deemed it to be “rigorous and broad, focusing equally on basic and applied aspects of behavior analysis”, and have concluded that “ students who complete this program have experienced a course of study more like one might expect in a doctoral program than in a master’s level program.” The faculty has been described as “world class” and its research and service efforts as “cutting edge.” Above all, the department values community, with professors who genuinely care about their students and the people (and nonhuman animals!) they serve, as well as doing all we can to promote the viability of our discipline and sustainability of our culture. We work hard, have fun, and try to do good, and we hope to continue to build on our history of enduring contributions to behavior analysis – as well as the larger culture – for a long, long time.

In this tutorial I will review some fundamental ideas concerning the theory of probability. I will concentrate on the Poisson, Exponential, and Gamma random variables, review their properties, show how they are interrelated, illustrate their uses in modelling behaviour and learning, and simulate them in a spreadsheet. I will conclude with some notes concerning the Poisson Process and apply it to timing and concurrent choice.

Quantitative models of conditional discrimination performance, based on well-established behavioral processes such as matching to relative reinforcement, effects of reinforcement on resistance to change, and stimulus generalization, can account for many findings of studies with nonhuman animals in signal-detection and matching-to-sample paradigms. This tutorial will provide a guided tour of these models as they have developed since 1978, explain their quantitative structures, and discuss their strengths and limitations in their confrontation with systematic data sets. The models to be discussed will be available as spreadsheets so that students and researchers can explore their properties and apply them to their own data.

Altruistic acts may been defined as costly acts that confer economic benefits on others. (In behavioral terms: punished acts that reward others.) In prisoner's dilemma games, with human players, a significant number of players behave altruistically; their behavior benefits each of the other players but is costly to them. I propose that such altruism is based on a straightforward balancing of undiscounted costs to themselves against discounted benefits to others (social discounting). I will describe two experiments, using prisoner's dilemma games, that test this explanation of altruism. In one experiment, costs were held constant but the number of others (benefiting from cooperation) varied. In another experiment, with only two players, costs were again constant but the amount of other player's benefit varied directly. In both experiments, cooperation increased as benefits to the other player(s) increased.

The paradigm example of Pavlovian conditioning is a dog salivating to a cue that occurs before the delivery of meat powder. Because conditioned salivation (the conditioned response or CR) reflects an association of the cue and the meat powder, Pavlovian conditioning became a favorite method of scientists whose primary interest was to elucidate the mechanisms of association learning. I will argue that this focus on a target conditioned response or respondent misses the broader biological significance of Pavlovian conditioning, which is to enable organisms to interact more effectively with significant biological events or unconditioned stimuli (USs). The broader perspective suggests that Pavlovian conditioning produces a wide range of behavioral and physiological adjustments that enable the organism not only to better prepare for the impending occurrence of the unconditioned stimulus but to also deal with the US more effectively at both the behavioral and physiological level. Thus, Pavlovian conditioning produces a reorganization of the biobehavioral system that is activated by the US. This broader perspective will be illustrated with examples from appetitive, aversive, and sexual conditioning.