Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Psychology

2020

Utah State University

Pigeon

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

A Translational Investigation Of Reinforced Behavioral Variability: Implications For Promoting Behavioral Variability In Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Ann Galizio Aug 2020

A Translational Investigation Of Reinforced Behavioral Variability: Implications For Promoting Behavioral Variability In Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Ann Galizio

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Behavioral variability is sometimes adaptive and can be maintained by the delivery of reinforcement. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often show restricted and repetitive behaviors. Therefore, interventions to promote behavioral variability in individuals with ASD are needed. The present line of research was designed to inform such interventions by investigating reinforced behavioral variability from basic, applied, and translational perspectives. Each of these laboratory studies involved participants making sequences of well-defined responses, which were compared to previous responses. Responses that meet a variability contingency (i.e., were sufficiently different from previous responses) produced rewards. Studies 1 and 2 were basic experiments, …


Harmonic Delay Reduction, Jay E. Hinnenkamp Aug 2020

Harmonic Delay Reduction, Jay E. Hinnenkamp

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Stimuli which, during the life of an organism, acquire the ability to increase the probability of behavior that they follow are called conditioned reinforcers. The concurrent-chains procedure has been used to study conditioned reinforcement for over 60 years. During this time several different models have been developed to explain how stimuli become conditioned reinforcers. The three experiments of this dissertation introduced a new quantitative model of conditioned reinforcement (DRTH) and tested its predictions against four existing models. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that DRTH improves upon the accuracy of its predecessor, delay reduction theory (Fantino, 1969), …