BCS 172 Lecture 14

Reinforcement (rerun slide)

• A consequence that accelerates or maintains preceding behavior

  • Intended and unintended

  • Idiosyncratic

  • Verbalized or “unrecognized”

  • Consider your ratio

Example

• hitting your head against a wall serves as a reinforcer (an autistic individual may like the pressure of the sensation)

  • Very unique to the individual 

• Case study example: boy kept hitting his head on the railing of his crib

• The attention that he got from doing it reinforced his behavior

(cont)

• There’s ways that you can I can optimize our reinforcement to maximize the development of others

  • Keep the reinforcement personal to the individual

  • Reinforcement degradation - the greater the interval between the positive reinforcement and the behavior, the less effective it is 

    • Don’t wait, call out positive behaviors immediately

Relationship

• We can verbalize the relationship between behavior and consequences that take place over time

  • We can do this because we can talk about it

    • We can establish rules over time like “hard work pays off”

  • Education is delayed reinforcement

What to do (how to make it)

• Make it:

1. Personal

2. Immediate

3. Frequent

4. Social

5. Earned

• Make the positive reinforcement known socially

• Make it earned

  • If you are receiving reinforcers over time, the kids will expect that all the time 

  • Need to ween them off of this behavior and let natural reinforcement take its course

Extinction

• When behavior with a history of reinforcement is dropped into a new schedule where that reinforcement no longer occurs

  • Example: You’re used to using your key to unlock your, but one day the lock won’t move no matter how hard you try. Therefore, you give up and stop trying to turn the key

• Suspension of reinforcement for challenging behavior that has a history of reinforcement

• Examples include ignoring a tantrum that is maintained by attention or removing an Ipad from a drawer that a students travels to during episodes of development

• Do not use in isolation… include skill-building (i.e., adaptive skills that serve similar function)

*Graph on phone (find graph)

Initial behavior response frequency → extinction burst → extinction occurs → spontaneous recovery

Extinction Burst

• Cessation of reinforcement results in a temporary, and often dramatic, increase in target behavior. Avoid the “training schedule”

  • When parents allow their children to get a reward to stop them from having a tantrum, it reinforces the tantrum behavior

Reinforcement and Prompting

• Prompting is the extra help that you give a student “under antecedent conditions”, in order that they have an opportunity to come in contact with reinforcement

• What’s the technical term for over-prompting?

  • You still need to promote independence, cannot over promote the individual

Limitations of Punishment

• Treat punishment in the life of a child as a limited technology

• By definition, only decelerates behavior - limited technology

  • Only suppresses preceding behavior

• The punisher becomes associated with the punishment

• “Countercontrol”

• “Spontaneous recovery