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The effects of a training procedure and two maintenance contingencies on consequence‐dispensing behavior were investigated. Four peer behavior managers were trained to supervise small groups of subjects (four to six per group) working in programmed math materials and were compared with a teacher skilled in the use of social and point reinforcement and response cost. Manager training was differentially effective in accelerating manager's rates of appropriate social and point dispensing. Having manager reinforcement contingent upon manager consequence‐dispensing resulted in moderately higher rates of appropriate social and point dispensing for three of four subjects than did having manager reinforcement contingent upon group study behavior. Two managers exposed to the group performance contingency before the manager performance contingency increased inappropriate social and point‐dispensing behaviors to pretraining baseline levels. Subsequent change to the manager performance contingency was effective in reducing the inappropriate dispensing behavior of only one of the two managers.

Three retarded children were trained, using prompting and reinforcement procedures, to respond correctly to three categories of prepositional requests: “put the___ next to the___”, “put the___under the___”, and “put the___on top of the___”. Training sessions were alternated with probe sessions throughout the study. During training, a child was trained to respond to one request (e.g., “put the doll next to the cup”); during probing, the child was tested for generalization of this training to untrained requests. Responses to untrained requests were never prompted nor reinforced. The results showed that, as requests from one category were trained, the children's responses to the untrained requests of that category became increasingly correct. As discriminations among two or more categories were trained, the children's responses to the untrained requests of those categories also became increasingly correct. Thus, the methods employed appear to be successful in training generalized receptive discrimination among prepositional categories and possibly can be utilized in training other generalized receptive language skills.

In response to parental requests for assistance in dealing with adolescent problem children, three parent‐child pairs were taught negotiation responses to hypothetical conflict situations using behavior rehearsal and social reinforcement. The negotiation process was separated into component behaviors that were practised during simulations by each youth and his parent under the direction of trainers. Results indicated that (a) the procedures were successful in training youths and their parents in negotiation behaviors that produced agreements to conflict situations, and (b) these behaviors generalized to actual conflict situations in subjects' homes.

Eight pigeons were initially trained to peck a white key for food under a variable‐interval 1‐min schedule of reinforcement. Then, a shock‐avoidance schedule was initiated and food was no longer available in the experimental situation. Under the avoidance schedule, each peck on the key postponed shock for 40 sec. A warning signal, consisting of tone and red houselights, was presented after 30 sec without a response. If no response occurred, a shock was delivered 10 sec after warning‐signal onset. Shocks were delivered every 10 sec in the presence of the warning signal until a response was made. The warning signal was terminated only by a response. Key pecking of all eight pigeons came under control of the avoidance schedule and responding continued throughout the 20‐day avoidance training period.

In Experiment I, pigeons were first trained on simultaneous matching‐to‐sample with either color stimuli or form stimuli, and then shifted to stimuli on the other dimension. Matching performance in the first session with stimuli on a given dimension was not affected by prior matching training with stimuli on the other dimension. However, in the first six color‐matching sessions pooled, birds with prior form‐matching training performed significantly better than birds without any prior matching training. In Experiment II, birds with experience matching both colors and forms in separate sessions were tested with novel stimulus configurations involving either novel stimuli or novel combinations of familiar colors and forms. Matching performance was not affected by novel stimulus configurations, except that performance dropped to a chance level or below when the standard stimulus was novel. In Experiments II, III, and IV, three of four tests did not show any effect of prior reinforcement of pecks at a novel stimulus, presented alone, on subsequent matching of that stimulus. The results were interpreted as indicating that matching performance in pigeons depends on the learning of stimulus‐response chains involving the specific stimuli employed during training. An incidental observation in Experiments I and II was that there were typically more excess pecks at the standard stimulus during form‐matching sessions than during color‐matching sessions, which may be related to the fact that form matching is more difficult than color matching.

A transfer of stimulus control procedure was used to teach three profoundly retarded adolescents a series of specific responses to specific verbal instructions. After imitative control of a behavior was established, a verbal instruction was presented immediately before the behavior was modelled. Each correct response was followed on the next trial by inserting a delay between the verbal instruction and the modelling of the behavior. The delays increased from trial to trial. Transfer of stimulus control was indicated when a subject responded correctly on five consecutive trials before the behavior was modelled. All three subjects responded correctly to each verbal instruction after that item was trained in a multiple‐baseline order. Generalization did not occur to items that had not been trained. Probe data revealed that some variations of the verbal instructions controlled responses after training was completed.

The purpose of this study was to investigate systematically the feasibility of modifying the behavior of autistic children in a classroom environment. In the first experiment, eight autistic children were taught certain basic classroom behaviors (including attending to the teacher upon command, imitation, and an elementary speaking and recognition vocabulary) that were assumed to be necessary for subsequent learning to take place in the classroom. Based on research documenting the effectiveness of one‐to‐one (teacher‐child ratio) procedures for modifying such behaviors, these behaviors were taught in one‐to‐one sessions. It was, however, found that behaviors taught in a one‐to‐one setting were not performed consistently in a classroom‐sized group, or even in a group as small as two children with one teacher. Further, the children evidenced no acquisition of new behaviors in a classroom environment over a four‐week period. Therefore, Experiment II introduced a treatment procedure based upon “fading in” the classroom stimulus situation from the one‐to‐one stimulus situation. Such treatment was highly effective in producing both a transfer in stimulus control and the acquisition of new behaviors in a kindergarten/first‐grade classroom environment.

Four rhesus monkeys were exposed to an identical series of schedules that specified a uniform probability of reinforcement for every response. As probability was lowered slowly in 10 steps of 20 sessions each from 1.0 through 0.01, two distinct patterns of responding emerged. Two subjects showed high, pause‐free response rates that increased with each successive reduction in reinforcement probability. The other two showed consistent post‐reinforcement pausing at all probabilities, including 1.0, and substantially lower response rates that peaked at the moderate probability values of 0.04 and 0.03. This low‐rate pattern was found to be correlated with a pre‐experimental preference in the two subjects for mouthing and chewing food pellets one at a time, while the former high‐rate, pause‐free pattern was linked to a long‐standing habit of “pouch feeding” in the other monkeys. These idiosyncratic collateral behaviors that differentiated the schedule performances appeared neither superstitious in origin, nor useful in the case of the low‐rate monkeys.

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