Podlesnik Christopher A, Bai John Y H, Skinner Katherine A
Florida Institute of Technology and The Scott Center for Autism Treatment.
The University of Auckland.
J Exp Anal Behav. 2016 May;105(3):427-44. doi: 10.1002/jeab.206.
Studies of behavioral momentum reveal that reinforcing an alternative response in the presence of a target response reduces the rate of target responding but increases its persistence, relative to training the target response on its own. Because of the parallels between these studies and differential-reinforcement techniques to reduce problem behavior in clinical settings, alternative techniques to reduce problem behavior without enhancing its persistence are being explored. One potential solution is to train an alternative response in a separate stimulus context from problem behavior before combining the alternative stimulus with the target stimulus. The present study assessed how differences in reinforcement contingencies and rate for alternative responding influenced resistance to extinction of target responding when combining alternative and target stimuli in pigeons. Across three experiments, alternative stimuli signaling a response-reinforcer dependency and greater reinforcer rates more effectively decreased the persistence of target responding when combining alternative and target stimuli within the same extinction tests, but not when compared across separate extinction tests. Overall, these findings reveal that differences in competition between alternative and target responding produced by contingencies of alternative reinforcement could influence the effectiveness of treating problem behavior through combining stimulus contexts.
行为动量研究表明，相对于单独训练目标反应，在目标反应出现时强化替代反应会降低目标反应的速率，但会增加其持续性。由于这些研究与临床环境中减少问题行为的差别强化技术存在相似之处，因此人们正在探索在不增强问题行为持续性的情况下减少问题行为的替代技术。一种潜在的解决方案是，在将替代刺激与目标刺激相结合之前，在与问题行为不同的刺激情境中训练替代反应。本研究评估了在鸽子中将替代刺激与目标刺激相结合时，替代反应的强化偶然性和速率差异如何影响目标反应对消退的抵抗力。在三个实验中，在相同的消退测试中结合替代刺激和目标刺激时，表明反应-强化物依赖性和更高强化物速率的替代刺激更有效地降低了目标反应的持续性，但在不同的消退测试之间进行比较时则不然。总体而言，这些发现表明，替代强化的偶然性所产生的替代反应与目标反应之间竞争的差异，可能会影响通过结合刺激情境来治疗问题行为的效果。
