Lecture 4 increasing THE FREQUENCY OF BEHAVIOR – prompting and fading Behavior Analysis

Review What is reinforcement?  It’s the procedure of providing consequences for a behavior that increase or maintain the frequency of that behavior And consequences I refer to are called?  Reinforcers A reinforcer is?  An event that, when made contingent on a behavior, increases or maintains the rate of that behavior. Reinforcement is a powerful procedure, but you cannot reinforce a behavior that doesn’t occur. One way to get a behavior to occur is to use prompts.

Prompts Informally, a prompt can be defined as a cue or hint meant to induce a person to perform a desired behavior But the flash card definition is Prompt: an antecedent that induces a person to perform a behavior that otherwise does not occur

Prompts Behaviorists generally recognize 5 different types of prompts:  Verbal  Gestural  Physical  Modeling  Environmental

Verbal prompts Verbal prompts involve spoken words, written words or even parts of words  For example, if I asked you to define reinforcement then I could start off the definition ‘It’s the procedure of providing consequences….’ This is a verbal prompt  Or if you meet a shy 2 year old and ask ‘what's your name’ His mother may say to him ‘say Billy’. She is attempting to prompt the appropriate reply to your question

Verbal prompts Teachers tend to use verbal prompts a lot  Imagine a child who cannot remember the word that describes the greatest football team in Turkey. The teacher might say ‘Gala… Instructions are other types of prompts.  If the coach says ‘to write a good essay, it must have an introduction and a conclusion’ then this could be a prompt. However, it is important to note that it only counts as a prompt if the prompt has the desired effect i.e. if you do include an intro and conclusion in the essay.  Teachers often make this mistake. They use rhetorical questions as a way to prompt thinking, however if the questions don’t stimulate thinking then they haven't prompted new behavior

Gestural prompts Gestural prompts involve facial expressions and posture.  For example, a teacher may restore order to the class by putting her fingers to her lips. Remember, however, that prompts are only prompts if they have the desired effect.  Imagine for example a kids educational TV program. There is no way to know if the gestural prompts have their desired effect because the audience is at home

Physical prompts The use of physical prompts is often called physical guidance It means guiding the person’s body through the required movement.  For example, you will often see men showing women how to swing a golf club!  Here the man is physically prompting the appropriate behavior

Modeling prompts Another way of prompting is to demonstrate or model it. Most children learn to imitate modeled behavior sometime during infancy And once a child will imitate modeled behavior, models are an extremely efficient way of prompting desired behavior Parents often use modeling  For example your parents probably taught you to use knives and forks by modeling prompts  If you want to teach a kid to ring 999 in an emergency, then modeling the behavior on a pretend phone will do the trick Those are the 4 basic types of prompts, some people also recognize environmental prompts as the 5 th type

Environmental prompts An environmental prompt is an arrangement of the physical environment that induces the desired behavior.  For example, my dog really struggles to get into the car so I built her a ramp. However Henry wouldn’t use it at first. Since the use of the ramp did not occur naturally, I had to prompt the behavior. So I walked up the ramp myself, I tried physical guidance but these things didn’t work.  So I tried to modify the environment by blocking off other access to the car. If Henry could not get in the car in any other way, then he HAD to use the ramp! I had modified the physical environment in such a way that the desired behavior was more likely to occur

Prompts Remember that a prompt is a way of getting a person to perform a behavior that does not usually occur. But in order to maintain or increase the frequency of the behavior you will still have to reinforce it. Like a prompt gets the engine going, but reinforcement keeps the car running! The reason you prompt a behavior is so that you can reinforce it Importantly, many of these prompts are used together to produce the desired behavior

Prompting and Fading Prompting is only the first step of the prompting and fading procedure  For example, if you prompt the shy kid with ‘say Billy’ when he is two years old, and he repeats ‘Billy’ then that’s great. But you don’t want to have to do this when he is 20 years old! That’s why the prompting and fading procedure is important

Prompting and fading The action of a prompt is prompting  Prompting means inducing the person to perform a desired behavior by presenting a prompt  The flash card definition is Prompting: the procedure of providing antecedents that evoke a target behavior. However, although prompts are very helpful, sooner or later we want to be able to do things on our own. Therefore it is important to wean people off prompts if possible

Fading Behaviorists usually wean people off prompts through a procedure called fading Fading: gradually reducing the strength of a prompt  For example, how do we get 2 year old Billy from repeating the prompt ‘say Billy’ to a point where he will say it by himself?  In order to do this we have to gradually reduce the prompt  There are a number of ways to do this:  Say Billy, Say Bill, Say Bi, Say B  Whisper is more quietly until you are lip synching

Task I want you to think of examples of prompting. Then I want you to think about how you would fade that prompt. You have 15 minutes

Studies of Prompting and Fading Prompting and fading tends to be used by parents, teachers and other who try to build new skills However the majority of empirical research involves severely disturbed or handicapped people We we now look at two studies:  The first involves an autistic boy (Wolf et al, 1964)  The second involves a person with schizophrenia (Wong & Woolsey, 1989)

Wolf et al (1964) Richard was a 3 and half year old autistic boy with lots of problems; tantrums, eating problems and so on. He also did not speak.  However he did sometimes sing the words of various songs that he liked.  But he wouldn’t say ordinary kinds of things and would only mimic like a parrot: if you said to him, ‘hello Richard’, he would say ‘hello Richard’ back! The therapist aimed to get Richard talking in a more normal way

Wolf et al (1964) The training began by showing Richard five pictures one at a time, and prompting him to name the item shown.  For example the teacher would show him a picture and say ‘this is a cat, now say cat’. The teacher would repeat this several times until Richard said ‘cat’. After which she would praise him immediately and give him a bit of food!  At first the teacher tried candy and fruit as reinforcers but these didn’t work with Richard.  So the researchers ended up using Richards breakfast and lunch meals as reinforcers. When he answered correctly, the teacher would give Richard a bit of breakfast or lunch.

Wolf et al (1964) After several days of training, Richard could name all of the words, so the researchers began fading the prompts. They then moved onto other types of words  Household items  Abstract nouns  More complicated questions Richards progress continued so that by the time he was 5, he was much more verbal and could speak without adult prompts This was remarkable at the time, because before behavior analysis, parents of autistic children were told to put their kid in an institution and forget about them!

Wong and Woolsey (1989) These researchers used prompting and fading to re- establish basic conversational skills in chronic schizophrenics. In order to do this they used a specific prompting procedure:  If the behavior does not occur, you provide a weak prompt.  If it still doesn't’t occur you provide a stronger prompt  And so on!  When the behavior finally occurs you reinforce it.  Then you move back down the scale until the behavior occurs following the weak prompt or no prompt at all

Wong and Woolsey (1989) One patient was a 44 year old woman named Theresa who had been in a psychiatric hospital for 14 years. Her level of conversation was low, so the researchers aimed to re-establish 5 basic conversational skills, such as: Returning a greeting, answering a question like ‘how are you Researchers took a baseline measure of Theresa’s behavior, twice a day for 5 days in a week.

Wong and Woolsey (1989) Training consisted of prompting and reinforcing the appropriate behavior  The trainer would start with the natural cue (hello Theresa) and wait ten seconds for the reply  If Theresa did not answer the researcher would provide instructions and model the behavior.  The researcher would then test Theresa again.  If she still didn’t respond then he would use a stronger prompt e.g. candy Baseline data showed that Theresa’s conversational skills were close to non-existent With prompting and fading, they improved dramatically. Maybe a graph would make this clearer…..

Rules for prompting and fading The proper use of prompting and fading can be a very important part of an effort to increase the frequency of a target behavior There are 4 rules that will help you to make effective use of this procedure  1. Define the target behavior  2. Identify suitable prompts  3. Prompt, reinforce, then fade  4. Monitor the results

Define the target behavior As always, we begin by defining exactly what behavior we want to change. In this case that means identifying the behavior that we want to prompt Be as specific as possible

Identify suitable prompts You need to identify a prompt that will reliably produce the behavior. There are usually any number of events that will serve as prompts. In selecting, its generally best to begin with the weakest one. This is because eventually you will want to fade the prompt altogether, and this will be more difficult when the prompt is stronger

Prompt, reinforce, and fade. The reason for prompting behavior is so that you can reinforce it. If you don’t reinforce the prompt will lose its power Prompting and not reinforcing behavior is pretty common  e.g. think of a teacher that says ‘look at me’ but does not reinforce the behavior of looking at her when the behavior occurs If you provide the prompt and behavior does not appear then you will have to try a stronger prompt until it does. When it does, reinforce it! After this you begin to fade the prompt, you must move back down the ladder of prompts!

Monitor the results You must always monitor the results to see if you are progressing. It will also inform your use of prompting and fading e.g. you could fading the prompt too quickly.

Problems with prompting and fading The goal of prompting and fading is to have the target behavior occur reliably in appropriate situations  You prompt the behavior so that you can reinforce it  You fade the prompts so that the behavior occurs without them To achieve this you must fade the prompts gradually  People often have a hard time with fading, when you reduce the prompt too quickly, the behavior wont occur  On the other hand, if you fade the prompt too slowly the process could take years! It is therefore different and experimental with each client

Flash cards Prompt  antecedent that induces a person to perform a behavior that otherwise does not occur verbal prompt  a prompt with spoken or written words or parts of words gestural prompt  a prompt involving facial expressions and posture physical prompt  a prompt that uses physical guidance modeling prompt  a prompt that demonstrates or models the behavior environmental prompt  an arrangement of the physical environment to induce desired behavior prompting  procedure of providing antecedents that evoke a target behavior fading  gradually reducing the strength of a prompt

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