Some effects of combining reinforcers in operant training with mentally handicapped persons.
Adding tangible rewards to social praise offers no learning gain and can make the behavior stop sooner when rewards end.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with six adults who had intellectual disabilities. Each person learned a simple assembly task.
The trainers compared three reward types: social praise alone, small candy alone, or praise plus candy together.
What they found
Adding candy to praise gave zero extra learning speed. All three reward types taught the skill at the same rate.
When rewards stopped, praise-only learners kept working longest. The candy-plus-praise group quit fastest.
How this fits with other research
Bonfonte et al. (2020) saw the same pattern: one strong reinforcer beats a mixed pair. Their edibles beat new tokens, just like praise here beat praise-plus-candy.
Weinsztok et al. (2022) updated the story. They showed that bigger or better quality rewards can protect a treatment when staff slip up. The 1988 study used small candy; bigger rewards might have changed the outcome.
Krentz et al. (2016) extended the idea to natural settings. Their tokens tripled walking laps for adults with ID, showing single reward systems can still shine in real life.
Why it matters
You can skip the extra reinforcer. Pick the strongest, simplest reward and stick with it. Praise is cheap, easy, and keeps working when you fade it out. Save your edible budget for times you truly need a boost.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Two experiments investigated the conventional practice of combining social and tangible rewards as a compound reinforcer in operant training procedures for mentally retarded persons. In the first experiment, there were no significant differences in acquisition of a color discrimination between subjects receiving combined social and food reinforcement and those receiving only one of the component reinforcers. In subsequent extinction, subjects who had received social reinforcement on its own responded more than combined reward subjects, who did not differ in extinction responding from food reward alone subjects. In the second study, higher rates of a simple manipulative response were established during training with food reinforcement alone and with combined reinforcement than with social reinforcement alone. Nevertheless, resistance to extinction was again superior after social reinforcement alone than after the food or combined reinforcement. This was the case despite generalization decrements from acquisition contingencies to extinction being kept to a minimum in this second study by the use of noncontingent reinforcement as the extinction procedure. Neither experiment, therefore, found any beneficial effects of combining the rewards, either in acquisition or in subsequent extinction.
Behavior modification, 1988 · doi:10.1177/01454455880124003