Comparing fixed‐amount and progressive‐amount DRO Schedules for tic suppression in youth with chronic tic disorders
Fixed-amount DRO beats progressive DRO for tics—same suppression, less hassle.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with six kids who had Tourette syndrome.
They tested two ways to pay kids for not having tics.
One way gave the same reward every time the kid stayed tic-free for a set time.
The other way started small but made the reward bigger each time the kid succeeded.
They flipped between the two methods each day to see which worked better.
What they found
Both reward plans cut tics by the same amount.
The bigger-and-bigger reward plan did not work any better.
Kids actually liked the steady reward plan more.
Parents also said the steady plan was easier to run at home.
How this fits with other research
Lowe et al. (1974) got the same fast drop in repetitive behavior when they used a simple reward rule for thumbsucking.
Both studies show you do not need fancy schedules to stop habits.
Exline et al. (2024) used more complex schedule rules in FCT, but their kids had different goals.
The tic study keeps it simple and still wins.
Carey et al. (2014) warn that small data tricks can fool your eyes; this study used full data and found no fake wins.
Why it matters
Use fixed-amount DRO when you treat tics. Skip the extra math. Kids like it, parents can do it, and you get the same results. Save your time for teaching other skills.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Chronic tic disorders (CTDs) involve motor and/or vocal tics that often cause substantial distress and impairment. Differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO) schedules of reinforcement produce robust, but incomplete, reductions in tic frequency in youth with CTDs; however, a more robust reduction may be needed to affect durable clinical change. Standard, fixed-amount DRO schedules have not commonly yielded such reductions, so we evaluated a novel, progressive-amount DRO schedule, based on its ability to facilitate sustained abstinence from functionally similar behaviors. Five youth with CTDs were exposed to periods of baseline, fixed-amount DRO (DRO-F), and progressive-amount DRO (DRO-P). Both DRO schedules produced decreases in tic rate and increases in intertic interval duration, but no systematic differences were seen between the two schedules on any dimension of tic occurrence. The DRO-F schedule was generally preferred to the DRO-P schedule. Possible procedural improvements and other future directions are discussed.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2017 · doi:10.1002/jaba.360