Motivational Refinements for Facilitating Reinforcement Schedule Thinning

During traditional schedule thinning during functional communication training with discriminative stimuli (e.g., multiple schedules, chained schedules), practitioners correlate a unique stimulus with reinforcement (e.g., a green card) and another for extinction (e.g., a red card). When the reinforcement and extinction stimuli are presented, the child's communication responses are honored or not honored, respectively. Behavior analysts begin with a brief period of extinction (e.g., 2 s) and gradually increase that duration as the child displays low levels of destructive behavior and high levels of discriminated communication responses (i.e., communication requests during reinforcement components only) until the child reaches a terminal schedule informed by caregiver/child preference (e.g., 2.5-min reinforcement, 10-min extinction). Typically, the starting extinction period is brief and arbitrarily selected and there are no competing stimuli programmed.

This intervention involves the same general components as Traditional Schedule Thinning. However, rather than starting with an arbitrary duration of the extinction component (e.g., 2 s), the behavior analyst empirically derives the starting point based on a progressive-interval assessment (PIA). The PIA involves rapidly increasing the duration of the extinction component within a single session to determine the leanest schedule of reinforcement that does not produce untoward effects. Behavior analysts will progress through the following extinction durations within a single session: 3 s, 11 s , 21 s, 34 s, 50 s, 70 s, 95 s, 126 s, 164 s, 213 s, and 270 s. For example, if the participant displays destructive behavior at 164 s consistently, but not at 126 s, the experimenters will start schedule thinning with a 126-s extinction component. There will be no competing stimuli programmed in this intervention.

This intervention is identical to PIA-Informed Schedule Thinning except that behavior analysts will program competing activities (e.g., alternative activities like toys or therapist attention) during extinction components. The competing stimuli will be derived from a competing stimulus assessment in which destructive behavior is analyzed across various conditions in which only the activity is manipulated during the extinction period (e.g., a session with action figures during extinction, a session with tablet during extinction). The items that produce the highest levels of child engagement and lowest levels of destructive behavior are known as highly competing items.