An analysis of generalized imitation.
Generalized imitation dies the moment reinforcement stops—keep the payoff active while you teach.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The researchers worked with one late-elementary child in a lab room.
They praised and gave tokens each time the child copied English words.
They never reinforced Spanish word copies.
Sessions alternated between reinforcement and extinction to see what happened.
What they found
English copying stayed high while praise and tokens kept coming.
When reinforcement stopped, Spanish copies and then all copying dropped to zero.
The moment reinforcement returned, copying bounced back immediately.
Generalized imitation vanished as soon as the payoff disappeared.
How this fits with other research
Ingersoll (2012) extends the same idea to preschoolers with autism.
Brief imitation training plus praise lifted their joint-attention and social scores for weeks.
It shows the 1970 lab result holds in a real clinical group.
Nist et al. (2021) saw a similar crash: when alternative reinforcement thinned, old behavior surged, then fell to zero once reinforcement was gone.
Both papers agree—behavior you want sticks around only if reinforcement keeps flowing.
Why it matters
If you are teaching a child to copy signs, speak, or play social games, keep the reinforcers coming at first.
Plan a slow thinning schedule instead of sudden cold-turkey stops.
Check for generalized responses, but do not trust they will last without continued payoff.
Pair the teaching with natural rewards the child will meet in daily life so you can fade artificial tokens later.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
An experimenter presented English words to three intermediate-level children and reinforced accurate imitation of these words. The experimenter also presented novel Spanish words, but the imitation of these words was never experimentally reinforced. One subject quickly ceased performing non-reinforced imitative responses. The other two subjects were exposed to a series of conditions designed to facilitate discrimination. Upon observing the first subject for one session they immediately ceased imitating Spanish demonstrations. For all three subjects, when reinforcement was delivered for responses other than imitation, all imitative responses eventually ceased. When reinforcement was reintroduced for English imitations there was an immediate resumption of such responses to their previous 100% level. The occurrence of non-reinforced imitations in this and previous studies was discussed as being a function of one or combination of four variables: (1) similarity acquiring conditioned reinforcing properties, or (2) instructional, (3) coincidental, or (4) conditional stimulus generalization.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1970 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1970.3-39