Since 1970, the average life expectancy for an individual with developmental disabilities is estimated to have increased by anywhere from 12% - 20%. This increase in life expectancy has resulted in an increased need for skilled care for adults and older adults with developmental disabilities. However, relatively few service providers have obtained training to address age-related changes and even fewer nursing homes have staff trained to provide care for individuals with developmental disabilities. This workshop will focus on the contribution behavior analysts can make in the care of adults and older adults with developmental disabilities. Specifically, the workshop will focus on teaching attendees about physiological age-related changes, as well as memory and functioning changes. Attendees will learn about assessment and treatment procedures that can be used to address these changes and how service providers can focus their efforts to meet the needs of this growing population.

Engineering superior performance in business settings requires careful planning and attention. Training and motivation are important at every level of employment, ranging from the newly hired employee to the old timers. This workshop will present tools and techniques that ensure training will produce value-adding outcomes. This workshop will also discuss strategies for measuring and enhancing employee motivation on a daily basis.

Functional analysis (FA) is an individualized assessment designed to evaluate a person’s problem behavior in relation to environmental events that may affect the future probability of that behavior. Functional analysis is designed to identify (a) the environmental contexts in which problem behavior is likely and unlikely to occur; (b) the consequences that reinforce problem in those contexts; and (c) specific interventions that are likely to effectively reduce the individual’s problem behavior. In this workshop, I will show how FA methods have (a) increased our understanding of how environmental antecedents and consequences affect problem behavior in children with autism; (b) facilitated the development of novel and effective treatments, and (c) produced simpler and more efficient interventions for problem behavior. Finally, I will also show how descriptive data can be used to develop alternative functional analyses for idiosyncratic functions of problem behavior displayed by individuals with autism.

Feeding disorders are common in children and may be exhibited as a variety of topographies (e.g., food selectivity, food refusal). These problems may result in inadequate nutritional status and may be related to long-term developmental and behavioral sequelae. The purpose of this workshop will be to discuss methods of evaluating how specific behaviors can be defined and measured to allow quantification of variables related to the topographies of feeding disorders displayed by children with autism. A second purpose will be to review how this data-based approach can be used to prescribe and evaluate the effectiveness of treatment.

Children with autism show a variety of behavioral deficits and excesses that are amenable to behavioral intervention using the principles and procedures of applied behavior analysis. In this presentation, I will discuss the core features of autism and associated behavior problems that often cause great stress and hardship for families affected by autism. I will discuss the unique features of applied behavior analysis and discuss the research evaluating its effectiveness. Case examples from research conducted in our center will be used to show how applied behavior analysis methods can be adapted to meet the unique challenges provided by individuals with autism.

Feeding disorders are common in children and may be exhibited as a variety of topographies (e.g., food selectivity, food refusal). These problems may result in inadequate nutritional status and may be related to long-term developmental and behavioral problems. The purpose of this workshop will be to discuss home-based methods of assessing and treating feeding problems.

This program is designed to identify behavior management training methods and tactics for skill acquisition in neurorehabilitation settings. The scope of the problem in terms of frequency, funding and long term considerations necessitates that therapists function as efficiently and effectively as possible. While evidence based practices aide in identifying treatment methods, decisions made by using single subject designs help the practitioner determine if the person is making timely progress. Given the decreasing length of stays in rehabilitation we must use the most effective training and measurement methods available. It is our hope that this program will provide practitioners with useful information.

The stimulus equivalence paradigm has provided a basis for carefully controlled laboratory study of novel or emergent behavioral relations for over two decades. Sidman’s more recent (1994, 2000) theoretical treatments of stimulus equivalence have expanded original conceptualizations considerably in that all elements of a reinforcement contingency (e.g., conditional stimulus, discriminative stimulus, response, and reinforcer) are held to be members of an equivalence class. Many important developments in conceptual, experimental, and applied behavior analysis have followed from this work. This talk will review stimulus equivalence methodologies, and describe a translational series of experimental and applied studies from my lab that provide additional support for the suggestion that the reinforcer can function as a member of the equivalence class. Data from typically developing children and those with autism show that when multi-element class-specific reinforcers (i.e., auditory and visual conditioned reinforcers, edible primary reinforcers) are employed in either simple or conditional discrimination training, each element of the reinforcer compound will function independently as a nodal class member. The practical importance of these findings is illustrated by data from equivalence teaching programs used to establish basic math skills with young typically developing children, as well as those with developmental disabilities. These results have significant applied implications with respect to efficient technologies of teaching, in addition to their theoretical relevance.

The paradigm example of Pavlovian conditioning is a dog salivating to a cue that occurs before the delivery of meat powder. Because onditioned salivation (the conditioned response or CR) reflects an association of the cue and the meat powder, Pavlovian conditioning became a favorite method of scientists whose primary interest was to elucidate the mechanisms of association learning. I will argue that this focus on a target conditioned response or respondent misses the broader biological significance of Pavlovian conditioning, which is to enable organisms to interact more effectively with significant biological events or unconditioned stimuli (USs). The broader perspective suggests that Pavlovian conditioning produces a wide range of behavioral and physiological adjustments that enable the organism not only to better prepare for the impending occurrence of the unconditioned stimulus but to also deal with the US more effectively at both the behavioral and physiological level. Thus, Pavlovian conditioning produces a reorganization of the biobehavioral system that is activated by the US. This broader perspective will be illustrated with examples from appetitive, aversive, and sexual conditioning.

This picaresque presentation describes a youth’s attempt to walk the straight and narrow path to scientific glory, only to be immediately way-laid by rogue data and conceptual banditos. After a sojourn of 40 days and 40 years in the desert, the author has crept up on the miscreants from the rear, where he levels this weapon upon them: Adjunctive behaviors such as schedule-induced polydipsia are said to be induced by periodic delivery of incentives, but not reinforced by them. That standard treatment hinges on the assumptions of a necessary role of contingency in conditioning, and of very steep delay of reinforcement gradients. The evidence and arguments for this position are reviewed in this talk and rejected. In their place data are presented that support different delay of reinforcement gradients for different classes of responses. This conception, already acknowledged for extreme cases such as taste aversions, organizes a wide variety of observations, and provides the rudiments for a more powerful theory of conditioning.

Dr. Soto will distinguish between allosteric and orthosteric modulation of receptor function, describe the current notions regarding the functions of the different GABAA receptor subtypes, and identify the reasons why the GABAA receptors with alpha5 subunits are of interest as a target for pharmacotherapies.

Cutaneous melanoma accounts for 5% of skin cancers but 80% of skin cancer deaths, in part because it is often not detected until too far advanced to treat successfully. Improved early detection, quite simply, would save lives. Unfortunately, current "interventions," which consist mainly of telling patients and health professionals briefly about melanoma symptoms, have uncertain success in improving detection ability. We report some very early steps in an alternative approach in which symptom detection is approached as a problem in stimulus control. Among the problems with traditional approaches is that learners encounter only examples of clearly symptomatic and nonsymptomatic moles. In our laboratory studies we use morphing software to create images of moles in a variety of stages of symptom development. This allows us to precisely measure detection skill prior to any intervention; to describe the precisely the effects of "informational" interventions; and to pilot an intervention to improve detection ability that is based on errorless discrimination training.