Behavior Analysis Chapter on Stimulus Control

Stimulus Control and Generalization

• Stimulus control occurs when behavior changes in response to environmental circumstances
• Most behavior is under some degree of stimulus control
• Stimulus control can involve learned discriminations (simple and conditional) and generalization processes (stimulus generalization, equivalence, and recombinative generalization) which fall under the topic.

Establishing Stimulus Control by a Single Stimulus

• Requires a salient stimulus, a controlled environment and a target response within the individual's repertoire.
• Reinforcing the target response in the presence of the stimulus, but not in its absence, is key.
• Avoid temporal patterns by using a variable-time schedule
• Delivery of reinforcement before the stimulus can limit discriminative responses.
• Changeover delay or momentary differential reinforcement is used to control for the inadvertent reinforcement of responses before the stimulus.

Differential Stimulus Control by Stimuli Presented Successively

• Involves a discrimination between two stimuli: a positive stimulus associated with reinforcement and a negative stimulus associated with non-reinforcement.
• Fading is used to rapidly differentiate between the positive and negative stimuli by maximising the difference between them initially, then gradually decreasing.
• The positive stimulus should be salient and the negative stimulus should be non-salient.

Conditional Stimulus Control

• Differential responses are made based on the presence or absence of other stimuli e g passing salt vs passing bread depends on the specific request
• Simultaneous identity matching: a sample stimulus presented to evoke a response to an identical comparison stimulus compared to non-identical samples.
• Oddity procedure: presents an array of stimuli (one is different), the response being to select the different one.

Equivalence Classes

• Shared physical properties determine many stimulus classes
• Examples: balls, cars, cats, humans, etc
• The actual physical configurations lead to categorization.
• Substitution and evoking novel responses in different contexts defines class membership e g toy box, doctor's role.

Stimulus Control Based on Recombination of Stimulus-Response Components

• Complex responses can emerge without prior direct experience
• Generalized imitation: children learning to imitate behaviours from a model, even without prior training
• Recombinative generalization: combining responses from training stimuli in new, novel ways, e.g. push car and drop glass, even if instructions were to do push glass and drop car and not the other way around.

Explore key concepts related to stimulus control in behavior analysis in this quiz. It covers essential terms and principles, including stimulus generalization, reinforcement, and their relevance to applied behavior analysts. Test your understanding of these critical topics to enhance your knowledge in the field.