Line-orientation generalization following signalled-reinforcer training

Establishment of mands following tact training as a function of reinforcer strength.

We examined some conditions under which a response acquired as a tact might facilitate the establishment of a mand. We taught 3 participants with developmental disabilities to tact the items ranked highest and lowest in a preference assessment and subsequently tested to see if the responses occurred as mands. All participants manded for the highly preferred item but rarely manded for the nonpre...

Schedule thinning following communication training: using competing stimuli to enhance tolerance to decrements in reinforcer density.

Functional communication training (FCT) is a widely used treatment for individuals with developmental disabilities who exhibit severe behavior problems. One inherent challenge of employing FCT as a treatment in the community is that reinforcement for appropriate communication cannot always be immediate or even possible in some circumstances. Of the few studies that have incorporated some form o...

Training Interface Rule Generalization

Learning processes affecting human decision making: An assessment of reinforcer-selective Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer following reinforcer devaluation.

In reinforcer-selective transfer, Pavlovian stimuli that are predictive of specific outcomes bias performance toward responses associated with those outcomes. Although this phenomenon has been extensively examined in rodents, recent assessments have extended to humans. Using a stock market paradigm adults were trained to associate particular symbols and responses with particular currencies. Dur...

Improved Generalization via Tolerant Training

Theoretical and computational justiication is given for improved generalization when the training set is learned with less accuracy. The model used for this investigation is a simple linear one. It is shown that learning a training set with a tolerance improves generalization, over zero-tolerance training, for any testing set satisfying a certain closeness condition to the training set. These r...