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ABSTRACT Skilled therapists are critical to the achievement of a high level of treatment integrity in behavior‐analytic programs. Behavior Skills Training (BST) has been used to train staff to correctly implement discrete trial teaching (DTT) in a variety of previous studies. The current study used a nonconcurrent multiple baseline design to evaluate BST with a brief video model on acquisition of DTT skills of staff with no previous exposure to this approach and no prior experience in DTT implementation. Maintenance was assessed 7 days after the intervention was discontinued. Results of this study (a) supported Clayton and Headley's study (2019) findings of the effectiveness of using BST to teach DTT to newly hired staff, (b) obtained more precise acquisition data by breaking down error correction step into more steps, and (c) indicated high level of acceptability of the procedure on social validity measures. The influences of the number of task steps and participants' previous learning profiles on correctly implementing DTT, and participants' patterns of occurred errors are discussed.

AbstractDelay discounting (DD) refers to the tendency to devalue an outcome as a function of its delay. Most contemporary human DD research uses hypothetical money to assess individual rates of DD. However, nonmonetary outcomes such as food, substances of misuse, and sexual outcomes have been used as well, and have advantages because of their connections to health. This article reviews the literature on the use of nonmonetary outcomes of food, drugs, and sexual outcomes in relation to health and reinforcer pathologies such as substance use disorders, obesity, and sexual risk behaviors, respectively, and makes a case for their use in discounting research. First, food, substances, and sex may be more ecologically valid outcomes than money in terms of their connections to health problems and reinforcer pathologies. Second, consistent trends in commodity-specific (i.e., domain) effects, in which nonmonetary outcomes are discounted more steeply than money, enhance variation in discounting values. Third, commodity-specific changes in discounting with treatments designed to change health choices are described. Finally, methodological trends such as test–retest reliability, magnitude effects, the use of hypothetical versus real outcomes, and age-related effects are discussed in relation to the three outcome types and compared to trends with monetary discounting. Limitations that center around individual preferences, nonsystematic data, and deprivation are discussed. We argue that researchers can enhance their DD research, especially those related to health problems and reinforcer pathologies, with the use of nonmonetary outcomes. Recommendations for future directions of research are delineated.

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AbstractIndividuals with deaf-blindness and co-occurring diagnoses, such as intellectual and developmental disabilities, may experience difficulty with independence, specifically with communication. One behavior-analytic procedure that may be useful for increasing independence and teaching communication to this population is the behavior-chain interruption strategy (BCIS). The current study examined the use of the BCIS to teach a 65-year-old deaf-blind participant with severe intellectual disability to use a SadoTech Elderly Monitoring Pager to notify others in the environment when help was needed. The researcher alternated between establishing operation (EO; help needed, items missing, or inoperable) and abolishing operation (AO; help not needed, items present, and operable) trials for three previously mastered daily living routines. The results demonstrated that following intervention, the participant used the device independently during EO trials and never used it during AO trials across behavior chains, and similar results were obtained during a treatment-extension phase. Limitations and implications for applied practice are discussed.

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Recent studies on food accumulation have shown that the rate of food-procuring responses increases by delaying the delivery of food (i.e., an increasing delay gradient). However, these studies have only delivered the food periodically, which could lead to the establishment of a behavior sequence between successive food deliveries. Therefore, the increasing delay gradient could be due to the establishment of different behavior sequences, composed of more food-procuring responses as the delay of reinforcement is lengthened. The present study investigated whether the increasing delay gradient occurs when the establishment of a behavior sequence is hindered by eliminating the periodicity of reinforcement from a situation of food accumulation. The periodicity of reinforcement was eliminated by using a variable delay in Experiment 1 and a variable inter-trial interval in Experiment 2. It was found that the increasing delay gradient occurred both with periodic and aperiodic reinforcement, which may imply that it does not depend on the establishment of a behavior sequence. In contrast, the increasing delay gradient was attributed to the temporal distribution of the food-procuring period within the inter-reinforcement time.