Evocative and function-altering effects of contingency-specifiying stimuli.
Tell the child what happens now, not later, to get immediate cooperation.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked preschoolers to follow simple instructions.
Before each request they told the child exactly what would happen next.
They changed two things: how soon the child could respond and how soon the reward or loss would come.
What they found
Kids obeyed fastest when the instruction let them act right away.
If the chance to respond or the consequence was delayed, compliance dropped.
Clear, immediate contingencies kept the children on task.
How this fits with other research
Garcia et al. (1999) ran a near-copy of the task and saw the same immediacy boost, but order mattered. When a delayed request came first, later immediate requests worked even better.
Lancioni et al. (2011) went further: just letting children sample which cue leads to payoff raised later cooperation, showing brief exposure to stimulus-consequence pairs can prime compliance.
Rojahn et al. (2012) added a twist: teaching kids to stop, look, and say "yes" before any instruction lifted compliance without changing the wording of the contingency.
Why it matters
Your antecedent language is a power tool. State the consequence right next to the instruction and keep the wait time short. If you must stack tasks, remember that a delayed request can warm the child up for the next one. Pair these rules with precursor skills or quick sampling trials to stack the deck for success.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study examined the effects of various forms of contingency-specifying stimuli (CSSs) on the compliance of 4-year-old children, and attempted to separate the evocative vs. function-altering functions of the CSSs. Each child was presented with a series of CSSs (one per day) that differed with respect to the deadline specified (immediate or delayed) and the consequence specified for performing the task. In the second part of the experiment, the CSSs either specified a delayed deadline or did not specify a deadline. Also, the consequences that were specified were either immediate or delayed. The results showed that under conditions where the opportunity to respond was immediately available, (a) CSSs that specified deadlines and immediate consequences exerted reliable control over behavior, and (b) deadlines, whether delayed or immediate exerted some control over the behavior, even when CSSs specified no consequences for task completion. Under conditions where the opportunity to respond was delayed, (a) CSSs of any kind were less likely to exert reliable control, and (b) children were most likely to respond when CSSs specified immediate consequences and made no mention of a deadline. Results are interpreted in terms of the role of CSSs as evocative and/or function-altering and in terms of deadlines as learned aversive conditions.
The Analysis of verbal behavior, 1992 · doi:10.1007/BF03392871