Six experiments were conducted with graduate students to assess resurgence of compound (i.e., multi-step) academic responding under free operant procedures. Participants learned two different interobserver agreement (IOA) methods -- compound behaviors -- through instructional phases before beginning the experimental phases. Each experiment…

Interventions related to differential reinforcement (DR) are among the most frequently used within the field of applied behavior analysis (ABA). However, certain conditions can inhibit the level at which effects of these interventions maintain upon treatment challenges or generalize across contexts. This can result in the relapse, or recurrence of…

This study evaluated the effects of four instructional variants on instruction following under changing reinforcement schedules using an operant task based on Hackenberg and Joker's "Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior," 62, 367-383 (1994) experimental preparation. Sixteen college-aged adults served as participants and were…

Over the past few years an increasing number of schools and community organizations have developed transformative learning spaces referred to as "MakerSpaces" for research and training purposes. MakerSpaces are organizations in which members sharing similar interests in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) gather to work on…

One member of each pair of 52 undergraduates, referred to as a learner, was trained BC conditional discriminations, with B stimuli as the samples and C stimuli as the correct comparisons. Responses of the learner were either reinforced or punished by another member of each pair, an instructor, who had previously mastered AC conditional…

We quantified the effect of first experience on behavior in operant learning and studied its underlying computational principles. To that goal, we analyzed more than 200,000 choices in a repeated-choice experiment. We found that the outcome of the first experience has a substantial and lasting effect on participants' subsequent behavior, which we…

This innovative textbook is the first to integrate learning and memory, behaviour, and cognition. It focuses on fascinating human research in both memory and learning (while also bringing in important animal studies) and brings the reader up to date with the latest developments in the subject. Students are encouraged to think critically: key…

Excessively devaluing delayed reinforcers co-occurs with a wide variety of clinical conditions such as drug dependence, obesity, and excessive gambling. If excessive delay discounting is a trans-disease process that underlies the choice behavior leading to these and other negative health conditions, efforts to change an individual's discount rate…

This article introduces the concept of motivating operation (MO) to the field of online consumer research. A conjoint analysis was conducted to assess the motivating impact of antecedent stimuli on online purchasing. Stimuli tested were in-stock status, price, other customers' reviews, order confirmation procedures, and donation to charity. The…

The present study examined whether the presentation of stimuli in equivalence relations with consequences increases the operant behavior that produces these consequences. In Experiment 1, both normal words and experimentally trained equivalence stimuli did so with young children. In Experiment 2, results were similar with college students. Here, a…

Across three experiments, the transformation of consequential functions in accordance with a seven-member relational network (A-B-C-D-E-F-G) was investigated. In this network, the relational rankings ranged from A, ranked the least, to G, ranked the most. In the first phase, contextual cues for more-than and less-than were established by training…

In studies of function transformation, participants initially are taught to match stimuli in the presence of a contextual cue, X; the stimuli to be matched bear some formal relation to each other, for example, a relation of opposition or difference. In a second phase, the participants are taught to match arbitrary stimuli (say, A and B) in the…

In two experiments, 40 undergraduate students were trained on conditional discrimination tasks (matching to sample) involving 1 of 4 types of instructional histories: (a) true instructions followed by false instructions; (b) false instructions followed by true instructions; (c) true instructions followed by true instructions, with a change of…