The effects of pairing non-preferred staff with preferred stimuli on increasing the reinforcing value of non-preferred staff attention.

This two-part study conducted preference assessments for staff members in three adults with intellectual disabilities and then paired attention from non-preferred staff with preferred stimuli. All three participants reliably identified preferred and non-preferred staff in both verbal and pictorial preference assessments, they emitted a higher rate responses during progressive ratio schedules for attention from preferred than from non-preferred staff and emitted more approach responses to preferred than non-preferred staff. When attention from non-preferred staff was paired with preferred stimuli, break points and the rate of approaches to non-preferred staff systematically increased as a function of stimulus pairings. The paper discusses the implications of preparing staff to work with people with intellectual disabilities.