It has been reported that during chemotherapy treatment, some patients can experience nausea before pharmacological administration, suggesting that contextual stimuli are associated with the nauseating effects. There are attempts to reproduce with animal models the conditions under which this phenomenon is observed to provide a useful paradigm for…

Tacts facilitate social interaction, and a strong tact repertoire can lead to the development of other verbal operants. For children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the development of a tact repertoire can reduce stereotypical and repetitive language and increase social communication, as functional language may reduce the amount of…

One measure of success for interventions treating problem behavior is the effects achieved in the face of a challenge (e.g., changes in reinforcement schedules, lapses in treatment integrity); one hopes to demonstrate persistence of appropriate alternatives and the absence of resurgence of target behaviors. The present study successfully treated…

We investigated the effects of a script-fading and discrimination-training procedure on mand variability in preschoolers with autism. Participants were taught to vary their vocal mands in the presence of written scripts, a green placemat, and a lag schedule of reinforcement. They were also taught to engage in repetitive mands in the presence of…

Five reinforcing activities were presented to and interrupted for two participants with autism. An errorless teaching procedure was then introduced with two similar activities prompting the participants to request information saying "How?" in order to resume the activity. The dependent variable included both the cumulative number of…

Prior research has demonstrated the establishment of reinforcers for learning and maintenance with young children as a function of social learning where a peer and an adult experimenter were present. The presence of an adult experimenter was eliminated in the present study to test if the effect produced in the prior studies would occur with only…

According to the retrieved context theory of episodic memory, the cue for recall of an item is a weighted sum of recently activated cognitive states, including previously recalled and studied items as well as their associations. We show that this theory predicts there should be compound cuing in free recall. Specifically, the temporal contiguity…

Two-way active avoidance (2WAA) involves learning Pavlovian (association of a sound cue with a foot shock) and instrumental (shock avoidance) contingencies. To identify regions where dopamine (DA) is involved in mediating 2WAA, we restored DA signaling in specific brain areas of dopamine-deficient (DD) mice by local reactivation of conditionally…

Operant conditioning of the H-reflex, the electrical analog of the spinal stretch reflex, is a simple model of skill acquisition and involves plasticity in the spinal cord. Previous work showed that the cerebellum is essential for down-conditioning the H-reflex. This study asks whether the cerebellum is also essential for maintaining…

The generality and long-term maintenance of a pairing procedure designed to improve the efficacy of less intrusive procedures were evaluated for the treatment of problem behavior maintained by automatic reinforcement exhibited by 2 individuals with developmental disabilities. Results suggested that a less intrusive procedure could be established…