Enhanced Tact Acquisition Using the Differential Outcomes Procedure in Children with Developmental and Intellectual Disa
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Enhanced Tact Acquisition Using the Differential Outcomes Procedure in Children with Developmental and Intellectual Disability Jessica C. McCormack 1
&
Douglas Elliffe 1 & Javier Virues-Ortega 1
# Association for Behavior Analysis International 2020
Abstract Pairing discriminative stimuli with unique reinforcers provides an additional cue to correct responding. In the current study, we evaluated the effectiveness of the differential outcomes procedure in teaching novel tacts and facilitating transfer of tacts to novel discriminative stimuli. Four children diagnosed with developmental or intellectual disability were taught a unique pair of related tacts both under a differential outcomes condition and under a nondifferential outcomes condition where the reinforcers were uncorrelated with the sample stimuli. In the former, the different outcomes were two forms of the same reinforcer. Three out of four participants met the mastery criterion sooner under the differential outcomes condition. Two participants also generalized to novel stimuli under the differential outcomes condition. When we tested for the inclusion of the reinforcers in the stimulus class, three participants demonstrated the acquisition of emergent stimulus–outcomes and response–outcomes relations. The study provides support for the use of the differential outcomes procedure as a cost-effective means of enhancing the acquisition of discriminated responses in an applied setting. Keywords Differential outcomes effect . Conditional discrimination . Tact training . Translational research
Under a differential outcomes procedure (DOP) stimulusspecific reinforcers are used during the concurrent acquisition of several discriminated responses. Researchers have found that when reinforcers for correct responding are specific to the preceding discriminative stimulus or response, that learning occurs faster than in standard conditional discrimination learning (Trapold, 1970; Urcuioli, 2005). For example, when training discrimination of letters “a” and “b,” learning will occur faster if responses to “a” are reinforced with stickers and “b” are reinforced with crackers, rather than with a common reinforcer or varied reinforcers. The DOP has been shown to improve accuracy in matching-to-sample relative to the nondifferential outcomes procedure (NDP), where reinforcers vary but are uncorrelated with antecedents or consequences in animals (Urcuioli, 2005) and humans (McCormack, Elliffe, & Virues-Ortega, 2019). The DOP is also shown to enhance retention in delayed
* Jessica C. McCormack [email protected] 1
School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Science Center, 23 Symonds Street, Auckland 1001, New Zealand
matching-to-sample tasks at extended delays in rats and pigeons (Jones & White, 1994; Savage, Buzzetti, and Ramirez, 2004). Improved retention has also been demonstrated in the human operant literature; for example, López-Crespo, Plaza, Fuentes, and Estévez (2009) showed that older adults recognized faces more accurately after 5-
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