The Emergence of Bidirectional Naming Through Sequential Operant Instruction Following the Establishment of Conditioned Social Reinforcers

Abstract

Bidirectional naming (BiN) is the integration of speaker and listener responses, reinforced by social consequences. Unfortunately, these consequences often do not function as reinforcers for behavior in children with autism. Accordingly, the repertoire of BiN is also often limited in these children. Previous research has suggested that so-called multiple-exemplar instruction, a rotation between different speaker and listener operants, may be necessary to establish BiN. The present experiment aimed to investigate whether sequential operant instruction might also work as a successful intervention to improve BiN skills after the establishment of standard social reinforcers. Standard social reinforcers were identified and established through an operant-discrimination training procedure in 4 participating children with an autism spectrum diagnosis. In the present experiment, all participants showed increased BiN after sequential operant instruction with conditioned social reinforcers contingent on relevant operants. Two of 4 participants acquired BiN skills. Moreover, the remaining 2 participants scored within the mastery criterion on listener responses, and 1 of them also met the criterion on the tact probes. Essential characteristics of an intervention, as well as the role of the echoic in the emission of BiN, are discussed.

Emergent Tact Control Following Stimulus Pairing: Comparison of Procedural Variations

“…Potential implications for the role of echoic responding should be tempered in light of the issues described previously, as each of the three experiments had its own strengths and limitations. However, they fail to provide support for the notion that echoic responses during pairing are crucial to later tact emergence (Horne & Lowe, 1996), and as such, they are consistent with the results of other studies that have attempted to document this functional role (Byrne et al, 2014;Carp et al, 2015;Delfs et al, 2014;Haq et al, 2017;Olaff & Holth, 2020;Petursdottir et al, 2014). Anecdotally, some of the incorrect responses of our participants also seem to contradict this role of echoic responding.…”

“…Others, however, have used stimulus pairing without a response requirement other than a prompt to observe the stimuli. Results have been variable within and across studies, but positive effects have been reported of interventions that include multiple-exemplar instruction (Gilic & Greer, 2011;Greer, Stolfi, Chavez-Brown, & Rivera-Valdes, 2005;Greer, Stolfi, & Pistoljevic, 2007;Hawkins, Kingsdorf, Charnock, Szabo, & Gautreaux, 2009;Olaff, Ona, & Holth, 2017), sequential operant instruction combined with the conditioning of social stimuli as reinforcers (Olaff & Holth, 2020), the conditioning of auditory and visual stimuli as reinforcers (Longano & Greer, 2014), and repeated exposure to stimulus pairing followed by tact testing .…”

“…Although the presence of an echoic repertoire has been found to be correlated with emergent tact control following stimulus pairing (Cao & Greer, 2018), a functional role of echoic responding during these stimulus-pairing encounters has proven difficult to demonstrate. At the overt level, the occurrence of echoic responses as children are exposed to stimulus pairing or listener instruction has been found to be uncorrelated (Delfs et al, 2014;Haq et al, 2017;Olaff & Holth, 2020) or negatively correlated (Byrne et al, 2014) with the subsequent emergence of tact control. In addition, requiring children to make echoic responses during listener instruction trials has been found to produce inconsistent effects or no effects on tact emergence (Carp, Peterson, Petursdottir, & Ingvarsson, 2015, Experiment 2;Ezell & Goldstein, 1989;Petursdottir, Lepper, & Peterson, 2014).…”

Verbal behavior development theory and relational frame theory: Reflecting on similarities and differences

“…Similar findings, albeit smaller in number, have been reported in the behavior-analytic literature. Olaff and Holth (2020), for example, conditioned social stimuli as reinforcers and found improvement during probes for BiN in their participants; critically, the procedure for conditioning social stimuli as reinforcers required the participants to engage in orienting toward the researcher, shifting gaze toward the researcher, or making eye contact with the researcher. Thus, these behaviors occurred more frequently after the training phase and could have affected the positive BiN results they obtained.…”

Acquired reinforcement: Implications for autism.

“…First, deficits in joint attention were clearly specifically linked to deficits in acquired reinforcement, supporting the hypothesis that such deficits are characteristic of autism. Second, acquired reinforcement emerged from an operant discrimination procedure, that is, one that established the target stimulus as a discriminative stimulus, rather than through stimulus–stimulus pairing (see also Holth et al, 2009; Olaff & Holth, 2020; Vandbakk et al, 2019). These results correlate well with the neurophysiological data suggesting a relationship between discriminative responding and activation of the n. accumbens.…”