The Emergence of Praise as Conditioned Reinforcement as a Function of Observation in Preschool and School Age Children

We tested the effects of an observational intervention on the conditioning of praise as a reinforcer with 2-school age and 2-preschool age children for whom vocal praise did not reinforce either performance (the emission of previously learned operants) or learning (the acquisition of new operants). Pre-intervention reversal designs for performance tasks showed praise did not reinforce; similarly, baselines showed the children did not learn when praise was the reinforcer and corrections were done for learning new material. The intervention consisted of multiple observational sessions in which each participant performed other performance tasks simultaneously with a peer confederate under conditions in which the confederate received praise for performing and the target child did not. Following the intervention, the post-interventions reversal designs showed that vocal praise functioned as reinforcement for performance and the post-intervention multiple baselines showed that the vocal praise acted as reinforcement for learning. The results are discussed in terms of the emergence of reinforcement as a function of observational Pavlovian conditioning (i.e., the observation of stimulus-stimulus pairings) and the potential for this procedure to condition praise as social reinforcement in applied settings.