An operant analysis of joint attention and the establishment of conditioned social reinforcers

Abstract

An operant analysis of joint attention skills suggests that conditioned social reinforcers play a crucial role in shaping and maintaining joint attention skills in typically developing humans. Although joint attention response topographies can be established successfully in children with autism through contrived reinforcers, natural consequences may not maintain the behavior. Hence, treatment of joint attention problems in children with autism may require the establishment of natural social consequences as conditioned reinforcers. The standard procedure for conditioning new reinforcers is the “pairing procedure.” However, clinical observations suggest that a pairing procedure may not be particularly effective. The current study compared the “pairing procedure” with an explicit operant discrimination procedure. First, a previously neutral stimulus was established as discriminative stimulus for a response that produced a reinforcer, and then tested for conditioned reinforcer effects when being presented contingent upon an arbitrary response with no additional contingent reinforcers. Second, another previously neutral stimulus was repeatedly paired with a reinforcer, and then tested for conditioned reinforcer effects as in the first procedure. Seven of the eight children completed both sequences, and five of these seven children emitted a markedly higher number of responses when stimuli established as SDs were contingent upon them than when stimuli used in the pairing procedure were response contingent. For the sixth child, the difference in favor of the SD procedure was minor, whereas for the last child, the difference was in the opposite direction. In sum, the results suggest that conditioned reinforcers can be more effectively established through the discriminative stimulus procedure than through simple pairing with an unconditioned reinforcer. Possible implications for joint attention teaching procedures are discussed.