Association for Behavior Analysis International

Modern behavior analysis must be consilient to prosper as a discipline. E. O. Wilson wrote, "The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science." Necessarily our science will profit from integrating reductionistic and artistic elements in the service of answering significant questions about behavior and addressing behavioral and other psychological challenges facing humanity. Over his career Dr. Thompson has been fortunate to use such strategies for basic theoretical matters concerning the integration of behavior, as well as applied problems in pharmacology, architecture, development of children with autism, and making the lives of people with disabilities better.

What started in the late 1920s at Harvard University as a small research project of a young graduate student involving several rats, some Rube Goldberg-like apparatus, and a handful of home-made food pellets is quite different today. Behavior analysis has grown in numbers, knowledge, and impact, and we have changed in composition. We have become, and continue to become even more of an international movement. This presentation comprises a brief historical analysis of some of the variables that have contributed to this internationalization of behavior analysis. They include seminal individuals crossing the oceans in all directions to bring and take behavior analysis to the four corners of the earth; scientific, conceptual, and application developments within the discipline; broader cultural events and technological developments; and personal contacts and exchanges of ideas among behavior analysts from different countries. The breeching of obstacles such as economic and resource limitations, perceived cultural incompatibilities with a behavior-analytic world view, language barriers, entrenched competing world views, and physical distance has required persistence, dedication, commitment, and ingenuity, but our internationalization has great momentum. Indeed this internationalization is essential to our future well-being.

Dr. Poling’s first publication appeared in 1976 and since that time he has conducted basic, translational, and applied research in several areas, resulting in publications in more than 50 different journals. This presentation will overview what he has learned regarding how to succeed as a researcher. Topics to be considered include selecting topics to study, being steadfastly pragmatic, persisting in the face of apparent failure, working successfully with other people, securing funds to support projects, writing well, publishing articles, and evaluating one’s own work.

We begin with a video example of children with autism in the 1960s, chained to their beds, receiving electric shocks, etc.; and then move on to a video example from modern times showing a child receiving a motivational pivotal response treatment. The emphasis here is on the power of programmatic research, with successive scientific findings building on each other to accomplish extremely dramatic results for improving the symptoms of autism. We will also discuss areas that still are in desperate need of research and intervention, such as parent stress, co-morbid disabilities, sex education, and employment.

Almost every major challenge in the world today can be seen as a failure to appropriately shape behavior, including chronic disease, economic inequality, violence and climate change. Why, then, isn't the proven science and practice of benignly shaping behavior widely embraced by the public and all our institutions? The problem is that the public clings to emotional appeal, and ABA bristles with data, evidence and rationalism. Therein lies a communications challenge on which rest not only the prospects for the field, but those for the human race.

Licensed psychologists, BCBAs, graduate students.

Steeply discounting the value of delayed outcomes is robustly correlated with addictions and poor health decision-making. Longitudinal studies suggest that this form of impulsivity precedes and predicts acquisition of substance use, and animal studies reveal a similar pattern. Despite the evidence that delay discounting is a trait, this tutorial will review studies that have discovered methods for decreasing impulsive choice. We will discuss procedures that produce acute, context-dependent effects (e.g., framing effects), and when these may prove useful in positively influencing human decision making. We will also discuss learning-based procedures that have proven effective in humans (e.g., delay fading and working memory training) and nonhumans (e.g., interval-timing or delay-exposure training) in reducing impulsive choice. Finally, we will discuss practicality issues that will need to be addressed if learning-based approaches are going to impact human behavior. We will not discuss effects of drugs or neurological manipulations on impulsive choice.

Licensed psychologists, certified behavior analysts, graduate students.

Functional (e.g., Skinnerian) and cognitive approaches in psychology are often seen as competing and mutually exclusive. We argue that although both types of approaches have fundamentally different aims, they are situated at different levels of explanation and can therefore be mutually supportive. More specifically, whereas functional research on the environmental determinants of behavior can help constrain cognitive theories about the mental processes that mediate environment-behavior relations, cognitive research can highlight new empirical phenomena that could help functional researchers to refine behavioral principles and their conceptual or theoretical analyses. We then highlight two implications of our framework for psychotherapy and research on human cognition. First, the framework clarifies the relation between behavior therapy, cognitive behavior therapy, and acceptance and commitment therapy. Second, it sheds new light on the study of rule-governed behavior.

Licensed psychologists, certified behavior analysts, graduate students.

Single-subject methodology and Skinner's caution against inferential statistics based on group averages have been very influential with researchers in behavior analysis. Here we review recent developments in the philosophy of science and methodology, including the "new statistics," and consider their implications for the quantitative analysis of behavior. We describe an account of scientific methodology—the Abductive Theory of Method (ATOM; Haig, 2005)—which details how empirical phenomena are detected and contribute to theory construction via inference to the best explanation, and show how it is relevant for behavior analysis.

Licensed psychologists, certified behavior analysts, graduate students.

Academic and behavior problems are highly co-morbid, yet little more is known about the relation between the two. Does one lead to the other? It is easy to imagine that as behavior problems persist and instructional time is lost to disciplinary procedures such as time-out and suspension, the lost instructional opportunities result in poor academic performance. However, it is also easy to imagine that as a young student's academic difficulties persist, school becomes increasingly aversive and socially reinforced behavior problems emerge. Effective interventions exist for both learning and behavior problems separately, but is it possible to implement intervention for one and achieve concomitant improvement in the other? If so, under what conditions is it possible to implement treatment that results in improvement in both academic performance and behavior? This presentation will begin with the question of the relation between learning and behavior problems and include data from several investigations of the influence of motivating operations, stimulus control, and reinforcement on academic performance and behavior.

Licensed Psychologists, certified behavior analysts, graduate students.

Programs prioritizing ?motivating Behavior Change? frequently fail to generate sustained engagement: over 80% of employees who attempt to create new, healthy behaviors still fail at continuing their training after just the first 30 days, and corporate lifestyle management programs return only $0.50 for every $1 invested (RAND, 2015). The CDC attributes 80% of chronic conditions to this inability to form successful wellbeing habits, resulting in almost $1 Trillion in lost productivity alone (CDC, 2009). The problem is not that people resist change, but they resist being changed. While health promotion can motivate employees to make episodic, temporary changes, when it comes to creating lasting results, learning the skill of creating new habits is what is vital for long-term Behavior Change. The reason: While motivation may get you started, habit keeps you going. Developed by licensed, clinical psychologists from Yale and the University of Washington, this session covers best practices in the design of sustainable Behavior Change systems that have led to the successful training of unconscious, daily habits, derived from more than eight years of clinical testing of evidence-based research from over 100 behavioral researchers. Habit Design has trained more than 500 companies and 100,000 employees - from UnitedHealthcare, Humana, Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, Stanford Medical School, Boeing, Google, The White House, and many others.

The study of delay discounting, or valuation of future rewards as a function of delay, has contributed to understanding the behavioral economics of addiction. Accurate characterization of discounting can be furthered by statistical model selection given that many functions have been proposed to measure future valuation of rewards. This tutorial will present a convenient Bayesian model selection algorithm that selects the most probable discounting model among a set of candidates chosen by the researcher. The approach assigns the most probable model for each individual subject using an asymptotic approximation to model probability based on the Bayesian Information Criterion. Importantly, effective delay 50 (ED50) functions as a suitable unifying measure that is computable for and comparable between several popular functions, including both one- and two-parameter models. Software to execute the combined model selection/ED50 approach is illustrated using empirical discounting data collected from a sample of 111 undergraduate students with five discounting models proposed between 1937 and 2006. The work this tutorial is based upon was published in the January, 2015, special issue of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior studying experimental manipulations of delay discountingand related processes.

Licensed psychologists, certified behavior analysts, graduate students.

Prior knowledge has been a key construct for theories of memory, comprehension, and learning. And traditionally prior knowledge has been identified as a resilient source of information, standing strong in the face of even the most compelling refutations and evidence. In the current talk I describe experiments that call into question this characterization of prior knowledge. Work from my lab shows that well-worn expectations appear malleable (and sometimes even non-existent) when people are confronted with contradictory arguments and facts. Across a variety of demonstrations involving the presentation of text content containing potential misinformation, people subsequently rely on encoded inaccuracies leading to problematic and surprising demonstrations of ignorance. Even obvious misinformation, which individuals should know better than to fall for, can influence subsequent problem solving and decision making behaviors. This talk will identify the consequences of exposure to misinformation, as well as highlight important boundary conditions for when and how people might be encouraged to engage in more critical evaluation in the service of successful comprehension.

Educational researchers, practitioners

Associative symmetry is one of a number of derived relations that can emerge after explicit training on other conditional relations. Here, untrained but accurate B?A conditional discrimination performances arise from training A?B conditional relations, a finding indicative of stimulus class formation (i.e., the development of sets of disparate but interchangeable stimuli). Recent research shows that human language capabilities are not necessary for associative symmetry; it can also reflect basic reinforcement and stimulus control processes.This tutorial will describe the history of the now-successful search for symmetry in an animal other than humans (viz., the pigeon) and show how this important finding led to demonstrations of other rarely or never-before seen emergent relations in a non-human animal. Central to these demonstrations is the presenter's theory (Urcuioli, 2008) of the origin of stimulus classes in pigeons, specifically, the reinforcement contingencies of training, the nature of the functional stimuli, and the effect of common functional stimuli across different reinforced relations. The theory makes precise, testable and often confirmed predictions about the training conditions that should, and should not, yield emergent relations such as symmetry, transitivity, and reflexivity.

Licensed psychologists, certified behavior analysts, graduate students.

From dawn to dusk, psychology affects every aspect of our lives. For example, success in educational settings, at the workplace, on the athletic field, and at home is influenced dramatically by interpersonal and intrapersonal communication. Are teachers facilitating motivation and learning among their students? Do supervisors empower workers to go beyond the call of duty to achieve organizational goals? Do coaches bring the best out of their players by enhancing self-motivation and cultivating interdependent teamwork? Do parents discipline their children so undesirable behaviors are not only eliminated but desirable behaviors and attitudes are promoted? This presentation will offer research-based principles and techniques teachers, coaches, supervisors, parents, and healthcare workers can use to instruct and inspire others to perform at optimum levels of effectiveness. Within this context, the vision of an Actively Caring for People Movement will be introduced � large-scale applications of behavioral science and leadership principles to cultivate cultures of compassion worldwide and thereby prevent interpersonal conflict, bullying and violence.

Licensed Psychologists, certified behavior analysts, graduate students.

Contingency is a fundamental concept in associative learning, but it has not been defined in such a way that it could be measured in most conditioning paradigms, particularly operant paradigms. A simple information-theoretic measure of contingency may be applied to most classical and operant associative learning paradigms. In applying it to assess the role of contingency in maintaining responding on variable interval schedules of reinforcement, we distinguish between prospective contingency—the extent to which one event (e.g., a response) predicts another (e.g., a reinforcement)—and retrospective contingency—the extent to which one event (e.g., a reinforcement) retrodicts another (e.g., a response). We find that the prospective contingency between response and reinforcement is un-measurably small, that is, the probability of reinforcement at any latency following a response does not differ from the probability of reinforcement following a randomly chosen moment in time. By contrast, the retrospective contingency is perfect. Degrading the retrospective contingency in two different ways, by delay of reinforcement or by partial non-contingent reinforcement, suggests that reinforcement is only effective when it falls within a critical time window, which implies that retrospective temporal pairing is critical, not retrospective contingency.

Licensed Psychologists, certified behavior analysts, graduate students.

Dr. Nicolelis will describe how state-of-the-art research on brain-machine interfaces makes it possible for the brains of primates to interact directly and in a bi-directional way with mechanical, computational, and virtual devices without any interference of the body muscles or sensory organs. He will review a series of recent experiments using real-time computational models to investigate how ensembles of neurons encode motor information. These experiments have revealed that brain-machine interfaces can be used not only to study fundamental aspects of neural ensemble physiology, but they can also serve as an experimental paradigm aimed at testing the design of novel neuroprosthetic devices. Dr. Nicolelis will also describe evidence indicating that continuous operation of a closed-loop brain machine interface, which utilizes a robotic arm as its main actuator, can induce significant changes in the physiological properties of neural circuits in multiple motor and sensory cortical areas. This research raises the hypothesis that the properties of a robot arm, or other neurally controlled tools, can be assimilated by brain representations as if they were extensions of the subject's own body.

Board certified behavior analysts, licensed psychologists, graduate students.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) reports that one in four thirteen-eighteen year olds has had an anxiety disorder in their lifetime. In 1998, Friman and colleagues encouraged behavior analysts to study anxiety but very few behavior analysts have done so. Anxiety creates a unique set of prior learning experiences, discriminative stimuli for reinforcement and punishment, and establishing operations. In this tutorial, a behavioral analysis of anxiety-related behaviors including the identification of: the effect of prior learning history of reinforcement and punishment for anxiety-related behaviors, discriminative stimuli that signal anxiety-related behaviors and establishing operations for anxiety-related behaviors will be provided. When anxiety-related behaviors are due to skill deficits, explicitly teaching coping skills, self-monitoring, and alternative responses is crucial. Using antecedent interventions with these children may be more effective than reward and punishment-based consequences from traditional behavior plans. The reduction of self-reported anxiety-related behavior by use of antecedent management and explicit instruction in self-regulation and self-monitoring strategies will be discussed.

BCBAs, psychologists, counselors, health care providers, social workers and/or teachers who serve children with developmental disabilities or children who are typically-developing who exhibit anxiety-related and challenging behaviors.

A bevy of current methodological topics relevant to psychological researchers working in diverse areas is presented. Many of them are widely misunderstood. Among these topics are: (1) the recent efforts to ban null hypothesis significance tests (NHST), (2) interpretation problems surrounding both conventional (i.e., Fisher and Neyman-Pearson) and Bayesian statistical inference, (3) the relationship between p-values and replication, (4) unjustified hand wringing regarding effect declines (often claimed to cast doubt on scientific methods in general) that appear to occur in many or most areas of science, (5) the increasing salience of single-case research designs and associated analyses, and (6) the stunning effect of complex black-box statistical methods on judgment. The historical context for several of these topics is presented in order to facilitate an understanding how we have ended up in our current state.

Behavioral researchers with a strong interest in research methodology.

Years of using lead in paint and gasoline resulted in widespread environmental contamination and human exposure. The particular vulnerability of the developing brain to lead puts children at particular risk for detrimental effects and numerous studies have documented the association of elevated blood lead in children with reduced IQ scores. Behavior analysis (BA)has been critical to the delineation of the specific cognitive deficits that underlie the IQ loss.BA hasrevealed deficits in learning/reversal learning that appear to result from increases in response perseveration and disruption of attention-related behaviors, particularly the ability to wait for reward. In the human environment, lead exposure occurs with many other risk factors for cognitive deficits, particularly in low socioeconomic status communities where lead levels are highest. Two such risk factors—high levels of maternal stress and early behavioral adversity in children—share pathways of brain mediation with lead, and thus could enhance or alter its behavioral toxicity. Indeed, studies in animal models show that lead-induced deficits in cognitive behaviors can be enhanced by, or even unmasked, in the presence of prenatal stress. Further, early behavioral adversity can further exacerbate the adverse effects of lead on learning.

Licensed Psychologists, certified behavior analysts, graduate students.

Young adults report greater levels of drug and alcohol misuse than any other age or demographic group yet they rarely report significant substance dependence or any desire to participate in formal substance abuse treatment. Dr. Murphy's presentation will focus on novel behavioral economic approaches to understanding risk, quantifying severity, and motivating change in substance use in high-risk young adult populations. Dr. Murphy has developed and evaluated a brief behavioral economic intervention approach that attempts to increase engagement in patterns of goal-directed substance-free activities that are associated with delayed reinforcement and will describe the treatment elements and outcomes. He has also developed and evaluated demand curve and relative behavioral allocation indices of reward value and will present data on their clinical relevance in the prediction of substance abuse severity and treatment response.

Undergraduate students, graduate students, and professionals in psychology and behavior analysis

Western dualistic conceptions of "mind" and "self" create unrealistic behavioral expectations of patients for themselves, for their families, and for professionals alike. An alternative neuroscience-based conceptualization of the self allows a deeper and ultimately more forgiving model of human behavior. This lecture presents emerging perspectives on the neuroscience of self and reviews the accumulating data on the science of mindfulness meditation. Specific application of these concepts and of mindfulness training in traumatic brain injury and intellectual disorders is also discussed.

Behavior analysts and clinicians treating behavior issues in individuals with traumatic brain injuries or intellectual disabilities.

Human memory evolved subject to the constraints of nature's criterion: differential survival and reproduction. Consequently, our capacity to remember and forget is likely tuned to solving fitness-based problems, particularly those prominent in ancestral environments. Do the operating characteristics of memory continue to bear the footprint of nature's criterion? Are there mnemonic "tunings" rooted in the remnants of a stone-age brain? Work from the presenter's laboratory suggests that: (1) processing information for its survival relevance leads to superior long-term retention, better, in fact, than most known learning techniques; (2) animate (living) stimuli are remembered much better than matched inanimate (nonliving) stimuli; and (3) stimuli that have been potentially contaminated by disease are remembered especially well. Understanding how memory is used to solve adaptive problems relevant to fitness, the presenter argues, provides critical insight into how and why human memory systems formed, and why they work the way they do.

Licensed Psychologists, certified behavior analysts, graduate students.

Dr. Campbell has conducted extensive research into the influence of dietary and other behavioral interventions as they relate to cardiovascular health, longevity, cancer and diabetes prevention, and a host of other medical benefits. He is a leading scholar and authority on the role of diet and lifestyle changes in the prevention and treatment of disease. He and his father published The China Study in 2005. The book details the groundbreaking work that he has completed with his father in the area of the prevalence of cancer and its relation to our dietary habits.

Licensed Psychologists, certified behavior analysts, graduate students.

In 2009, Congress gave the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the authority to limit the nicotine content of combusted tobacco products. Decades of research suggest that nicotine is the primary cause of tobacco addiction and that reducing nicotine might reduce the rate and/or prevalence of smoking and have a dramatic impact on public health. This presentation will focus on recent clinical and preclinical data that addresses the potential benefits and risks of reducing nicotine as a regulatory approach. Clinical studies indicate that marked reduction in the nicotine content of cigarettes lead to fewer cigarettes smoked per day and reduced nicotine dependence with little evidence of compensatory smoking. Preclinical data from rat models of nicotine self-administration indicate that nicotine reduction would likely also decrease the initiation of use amongst nicotine na?ve adolescent users and that other non-nicotine constituents of tobacco smoke have little effect on behavior. The primary exception is MAO inhibition, which appears to shift the dose-response curve for self-administration to the left when the cost is low (i.e., low fixed ratio). Together, these data add to a growing literature that suggests that regulated reductions in nicotine may have a positive impact on behavior and health. Funding: Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and FDA Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) (U54 DA031659). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH or the Food and Drug Administration.

Licensed Psychologists, certified behavior analysts, graduate students.

Research on a model Therapeutic Workplace has allowed for the rigorous evaluation of the use of employment in the treatment of drug addiction. Under the Therapeutic Workplace, adults with histories of drug addiction are hired and paid to work. To promote drug abstinence or adherence to addiction medications, participants are required to provide drug-free urine samples or take prescribed addiction medications, respectively, to gain access to the workplace and/or to maintain their maximum rate of pay. Research has shown that this intervention is effective in promoting and maintaining abstinence from heroin, cocaine and alcohol and in promoting adherence to naltrexone in heroin-dependent adults. This presentation will review research on the Therapeutic Workplace and summarize major lessons that have been learned in conducting this research. In addition, the presentation will describe three models that could be used to maintain employment-based reinforcement in the treatment of drug addiction: A Social Business model, a Cooperative Employer model, and a Wage Supplement model. Overall, this program of research suggests that employment could be useful as a means of arranging and maintaining therapeutic reinforcement contingencies in the treatment of drug addiction.

Behavior analysts interested in the application of operant conditioning to the long-term treatment of drug addiction.

It is well documented that children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) benefit from early intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI). The majority of programs for toddlers with ASD have been conducted in children's homes. Although there are some benefits to working in homes, there are a number of drawbacks such as isolation, cost, and lack of appropriate social and communicative models. The purpose of this presentation is describe the current state of knowledge about early intervention for children with ASD, including the results of two recently completed randomized clinical trials on school-based services. Implications of these results will be discussed as they apply to the basic dimensions of applied behavior analysis.

Students, family members, researchers, school administrators, private practitioners providing EIBI to children with ASD.

Sleep problems are prevalent among children, especially children with autism. Sleep problems negatively impact the wellbeing of both the child and their family. The good news is that most sleep problems of children are treatable by applied behavior analysts. Critical features of empirically supported behavioral intervention for sleep problems will be described along with ideas for teaching consumers about the prevalence and relevance of applied behavior analysts for addressing children's sleep problems.

Applied Behavior Analysts, BCBAs, intermediate

Drug addiction is a pernicious and prevalent problem with little available for clinical treatment. This presentation will review the presenter's recent studies that show roles for the ventral pallidum (VP), ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine (DA), and orexin/hypocretin brain systems in cocaine seeking and demand. A within-session behavioral economic paradigm revealed potent contributions of the VTA DA system to demand for cocaine. The presenter used designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs (DREADDs) to show that the projection from VP to VTA DA neurons is critical for cocaine seeking. Additional pharmacologic studies reveal that orexin inputs to VTA interact with glutamate inputs and those from VP to augment cocaine seeking elicited by cocaine-associated cues. The presentation concludes that DREADDs are a promising avenue for novel therapies to treat drug abuse.

Licensed Psychologists, certified behavior analysts, graduate students.

Behavior analysis expiates unfair preconceptions in Italy because of the lack of scientific culture and the psychoanalytic approach, both well spread in several clinical, educational, institutional, political and academic environments. Further, there are common misconceptions of our principles themselves and their applications. ABA Chapter of Italy (AARBA) has been committed to disseminating our science since its founding in 2001 and we have challenged all those prejudices. As professionals and members of the ABA community, we tried many ways before getting partially successful: AARBA tried to influence institutions and academics first, but the evidence provided by our experiments was not enough to move them forward their conflicts of interests. So, we changed the direction of our efforts, from top-down (from institutions to clients) to bottom-up (from clients to institutions). The efficacy of our application, especially in organizational settings, developed a community that got benefit from behavior analysis and that yearly have been gathering in our annual conference, since 2004. Invited institutions to our conference could not ignore the audience and have been obliged to endorse us, sometimes under negative reinforcement. It has been a hard work but worth it. This presentation will show the results of our successful applications and experiments and the impact they had on clients in terms of benefits and on institutions, in terms of consensus.

Students and practitioners interested in reviewing a possible application of behavior analysis to business and e-learning, and in understanding how to nurture and value OBM in the civil society.

Observing behavior is an operant behavior that has the production of discriminative stimuli as consequence. This presentation will review the main course of the scientific production in this field, from early investigations up to some of the most recent works. To analyze this quite numerous and diverse literature, the speaker will identify and describe the basic observing-response procedures that employed humans as participants, especially children and adults. The maintenance of observing behavior by discriminative stimulus of extinction (that is, S-) compared to discriminative stimulus of reinforcement (that is, S+) will be addressed and two sets of empirical works involving adults and children with typical and atypical development will be presented. The first work will present the current advances in the study of observing behavior by tracking the participants' eye movements. The second work will focus on the role of observing responses in conditional discrimination processes that lead to the formation of equivalence classes. Based on these recent findings, the speaker will discuss how discrimination is established as the product of the main three-term contingency interlocked with the observing-response contingency.

Basic and applied researchers interested in mechanisms of behavior change. Additionally, it should be of great interest to practitioners in a variety of applied settings.

Back in the 1950s, fewer than 5% of Americans were non-religious. Today, nearly 30% define themselves as such. And in many other nations, rates of irreligion are even higher. This recent increase of people who describe themselves as "none" in terms of religious identification is one of the most significant demographic shifts in recent history. Who are these non-religious individuals? Are they all atheists? Agnostics? Secular Humanists? And more importantly: what do these various designations even mean? In this lecture, secular typologies and taxonomies will be covered, and secular humanism -- as a growing worldview, existential orientation, and group identification -- will be defined, explored, and explained. For as the number of non-religious men and women continues to dramatically rise both in the USA and abroad, it is more important than ever to understand those men and women who choose to live without religious affiliation or beliefs, and yet still maintain core values, morals, and convictions which influence and direct so many aspects of their lives.

Board certified behavior analysts and graduate students.

Rosales-Ruiz and Baer first wrote about the concept of behavioral cusps in 1996. However, it wasn't until the publication of a JABA article the next year (Rosales-Ruiz and Baer 1997) and a follow-up article by Bosch and Fuqua (2001) that the idea begins to spread throughout behavior analysis. A behavioral cusp is a special type of behavior change because it brings the organism in contact with new contingencies that have even more far-reaching consequences. The concept of the cusp has been both theoretically and pragmatically useful for the field of behavior analysis. In practice, the concept of the cusp helps guide the selection of target behaviors. In theory, it contributes significantly to our understanding of the way that behavior changes. This presentation will illustrate the concept of the cusp and distinguish it from other types of behavior change, such as generativity, and types of behavior, such as pivotal behaviors. It will also highlight some of the developments that have helped advance the concept of the cusp over the last 20 years and discuss the theoretical importance of the cusp concept.

This tutorial will be of interest to basic and applied researchers interested in mechanisms of behavior change and to practitioners who work in a variety of applied settings.

Quantitative modeling is increasingly common in behavior analysis. Performance on concurrent schedules, timing, delay discounting, behavioral momentum, schedule and stimulus control, variability of inter-response times, and many other aspects of behavior, are often characterized in terms of mathematical equations and computational algorithms. This presentation outlines the advantages, challenges, and pitfalls of a quantitative analysis of behavior. In particular, this presentation is focused on identifying the outcomes that quantitative models may and may not deliver, the assumptions and pre-requisites for quantitative modeling, the risks involved in this strategy, and the tactics that minimize such risks. The presentation will introduce the concepts of model-based inference, parameter estimation, stochastic vs. deterministic models, likelihood vs. probability, parsimony vs. goodness-of-fit, Bayesian modeling, and model selection. This introduction will set the stage for the practical implementation of some of these concepts.

Licensed Psychologists and those interesed in quantitative modeling.

For more than a decade, APOPO, a Belgian NGO headquartered in Tanzania, has used scent-detecting giant African pouched rats (Cricetomys) to detect landmines and other explosive remnants of war and to detect human tuberculosis. APOPO has also explored other potential humanitarian applications of the rats. For several years, my students and I have worked with other APOPO personnel to ascertain how well the rats perform in detecting landmines and in finding tuberculosis, to devise strategies to increase the rats' effectiveness and efficiency, and to extend the range of valuable services they can provide. This presentation summarizes what we have learned.

Licensed Psychologists, certified behavior analysts, graduate students.

While quantitative modeling has become increasingly common in the behavior analytic literature, many researchers have received little formal training in the practical implementation of these methods. The purpose of this presentation is to encourage quantitative analyses of behavior by providing an introduction to modeling in Microsoft Office Excel. Excel represents an advantageous platform due to its wide availability to researchers in various settings and relative ease with which prominent quantitative models may be implemented. This presentation has three major aims: (1)to provide an overview of how to simulate quantitative models commonly encountered in the literature for the purposes of gaining an understanding of the model's behavior; (2) demonstrate how to set up a workbook to perform regression analyses and basic visual analyses to assess the goodness of a model's fit to data; (3) provide an accessible introduction to model selection techniques comparing nested and non-nested models to aid the identification of candidate behavioral mechanisms.

Licensed pschologists and those interested in quantitative modeling.

There is currently widespread concern for effective teaching at all levels of education. A defining feature of teaching—perhaps more than any other profession—is the range of variability in styles and approaches. Unlike the practice of medicine, for example, teaching is still seen as an art. Moreover, few college professors are ever taught how to teach; their only qualification is a Ph.D. and expertise in their subject matter. But nowadays when colleges and universities are struggling to attract and then retain students, it is imperative that instructors take more responsibility for the success of their students. They can do this by designing their courses and classrooms according to existing research and theory in behavior analysis and psychology. This presentation describes (a) the purpose and goals of assessment; (b) the principles of a high-feedback instructional system; (c) the role of assessment in a high-feedback system; and (d) one model of a high-feedback system.

Educators and teachers of applied behavior analysis.

Parent Management Training–Oregon Model (PMTO) is an evidence-based intervention that prevents and treats child and adolescent behavior problems by teaching parents strategies that reduce coercion and increase positive parenting practices (Forgatch & Patterson, 2010; Patterson, 2005). The intervention, which was developed by the group of colleagues led by Gerald Patterson, has emerged over several decades with a programmatic focus on families with youngsters with externalizing problems such as aggression, antisocial behavior, and delinquency. PMTO's staying power over nearly five decades is likely tied to the continuing integration of theory, science, and practice with a focus on improving outcomes at every level. In the last fifteen years, PMTO has been implemented internationally. Reliable and valid data using multiple method and agent assessment from U.S. and international PMTO implementations illustrate the challenges of making empirically-supported interventions routine practice in the community. Technological advances that break down barriers to communication across distances, the availability of efficacious programs suitable for implementation, and the urgent need for high quality mental health care provide strong rationales for prioritizing implementation. The next challenge is to reduce the prevalence of children's psychopathology by creating science-based delivery systems to reach families in need, everywhere.

This lecture will be of interest to applied researchers interested in mechanisms of behavior change and of implementation of evidence-based programs, and to practitioners who work in a variety of applied settings, particularly those who work with children with aggressive and other antisocial behavior.

Any perturbation of the stream of behavior has numerous effects. Delivery of a food reinforcer will activate approach and alimentary responses, elicit search modes, and instigate species typical foraging or predation repertoires. Any correlated stimuli will become conditioned--as an occasion-setter, conditioned stimulus, discriminative stimulus, or conditioned reinforcer. If the correlation is positive those stimuli will be approached; if negative avoided. Theories of conditioning have focused on one or another of these factors; that is called analysis. Synthesis requires understanding the development of these processes, each at its own rate, and as each interacts with the others. The resulting system is complex, in that it involves dynamic networks of interactions. The degree to which responses support or compete with each other, and each with higher-level organizations, may be described with the Price Equation. The evolution of dynamic and average steady states requires other models. This lecture provides an introduction to this next step in the evolution of the experimental analysis of behavior, toward the Syncretic Approach to Behavior, SAB.

Researchers in both basic and applied behavior analysis who are wondering "where next?".

Relational frame theory (RFT) is sometimes said to provide a foundation in basic behavior analysis for acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and ACT is said to be part of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) writ large. This lecture will consider the potential role that RFT could play in grounding ACT, and perhaps some CBT concepts, in more functionally based theorizing. The first part of the lecture will argue that the so-called “middle-level terms” employed in ACT, such as acceptance, defusion, values, and self-as-context, may be seen as lacking the (functional) analytic precision that many concepts in traditional CBT also lack. This lack of functional precision is entirely understandable for CBT, given its explicitly mentalistic origins, but it could be seen as placing a question mark over the functional-analytic “credentials” of ACT. The second part of the lecture considers the argument that RFT can “rescue” ACT from its apparent lack of functional precision, and concludes that it cannot do so without additional substantive conceptual development of the theory itself. A brief outline of how this conceptual development might be realized is presented in the form of a multi-dimensional, multi-level (MDML) framework for analyzing the dynamics of relational framing as generalized relational operant behaviors.

Individuals with an interest in conceptual issues pertaining to translational research, particularly in the domains of clinical behavior analysis, and human language and cognition.

Among the behavior analysts who first appreciated the scope and power of Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior, Jack Michael has been by far the most influential. In addition to having trained many of the most prominent figures in the field, Jack relentlessly refined and sharpened Skinner's analysis over the course of five decades. In honor of his unparalleled contributions, the Verbal Behavior Special Interest Group annually acknowledges a prominent figure in the field with the Jack Michael Award. The first three winners of the award will speak about Jack's influence on their work and on the field as a whole. Among the topics they will discuss are multiple control, establishing operations, automatic reinforcement, recall, and private events.Dr. Jack Michael was born in 1926 in Los Angeles and entered UCLA in 1943, majoring in chemistry. He served two years in the US army and returned to UCLA in 1946 as a psychology major. He obtained a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. at UCLA, finishing in 1955. As a graduate student, his main interests were statistical methodology, physiological psychology, and learning theory. During his first teaching job (Kansas University), he was much influenced by B. F. Skinner’sScience and Human Behaviorand, throughout his teaching career, he was primarily involved in teaching behavioral psychology (Kansas University, University of Houston, Arizona State University, and from 1967, at Western Michigan University). In 1957, as a result of influence by the rehabilitation psychologist, Lee Meyerson, Jack Michael began to apply Skinner’s approach to individuals with developmental disabilities, mental illness, and physical disabilities. During the next several years, “behavior modification” was in a period of rapid expansion and Dr. Michael contributed with his teaching, writing, and public presentations. He spent much of his academic career concerned with the technical terminology of behavior analysis, basic theory regarding motivation, and verbal behavior. He contributed to the founding of the Association for Behavior Analysis (International) in 1974 and served as its President in 1979. Among his many awards are: 1989 Western Michigan University’s Distinguished Faculty Scholar; 2002 Award for Distinguished Service to Behavior Analysis: ABAI; 2008 The Murray Sidman Award for Enduring Contributions to Behavior Analysis: Berkshire Association for Behavior Analysis and Therapy; 2009 Ellen P. Reese Award: Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies; 2012 Victor Laties Lifetime of Service Award: Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (SEAB); and in 2012, he was the first recipient of the award named in his honor: The Jack Michael Outstanding Contributions in Verbal Behavior Award from the Verbal Behavior Special Interest Group at ABAI.

The research on treatment of behavior disorders shows clearly that treatments are more effective when they contain an extinction component. However, clinical situations arise wherein the extinction component is not an option. Some examples of situations in which the extinction component is not an option include but are not limited to: a) the client is too large, fast, or strong to guide through a task in the case of escape behavior, b) the behavior is too dangerous to "ignore" in the case of attention-maintained behavior, and c) the specific source of reinforcement is unknown in the case of some automatically reinforced behavior. In addition, factors such as poor treatment integrity and dangerous extinction bursts at times compromise the extinction component even when it is prescribed as a part of the intervention. The presenter will review some of his own research and other literature on concurrent reinforcement schedules, differential reinforcement, and noncontingent reinforcement in order to suggest partial solutions to the extinction problem.

Behavior Analysts and Behavior Psychologists

The development of the recognition of self-like individuals, including relatives and conspecifics, often relies on critical experience with parents, siblings, and other predictable referents during early life. For example, in birds, exposure to conspecifics in the nest reliably cues species-recognition for flocking and mating. How then so brood parasitic birds, that lay their eggs in other species' nest, develop conspecific referents when raised by foster parents? And how do hosts recognize and reject foreign eggs and chicks in the nest if they have not yet laid a clutch before? The presenter’s research focuses on the experimental analysis of self-recognition in both parasites and hosts through phenotypic manipulation of the available cues for species recognition during development. The results reveal how a long-hypothesized mechanism, namely self-referenced phenotype matching, enables the evolution of brood parasitism in birds, and perhaps contributes to the ecological flexibility of recognition systems under socially unpredictable conditions in general.

Licensed Psychologists

Nature and nurture always work together. Genetic determinism in any form is not a viable concept. Evolution is a continuous process. Do contemporary "evolutionary psychologists" give these facts more than lip service? Some talk as if human behavior is determined (somehow) by genes that were selected 10,000 years ago and unchanged since then. Many evolutionary psychology observations can be explained more parsimoniously by the principles of behavior, mediated by a nervous system, that have been selected for just such plasticity. Indeed, behavior is both a product and a driver of evolution. Then, there are the implications of the immense flexibility in the larger biobehavioral system. The "systems" approach offers an evidence based alternative encompassing everything, including the many complex, nonlinear interactions across all levels of behavior and its development. This panel discussion compares the typical views of evolutionary psychologists with the systems approach and explores where behavior analysis fits in.

Behavior analysts and others interested in evolutionary psychology.

Zoos and aquariums strive to provide the highest levels of welfare for the animals under their care. This goal is achieved through evidence-based management where research, animal care and veterinary services work together to answer questions regarding animal welfare and turn findings into practice. Behavioral data is one of the many tools used within zoos and aquariums used to make informed management decisions. Historically, zoos primarily utilized negative indicators of welfare such as stereotypic or abno