The effects of pairing non-preferred staff with preferred stimuli on increasing the reinforcing value of non-preferred staff attention.
Briefly pair a non-preferred staff member with the client’s favorite items and their attention becomes reinforcing.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Yaw et al. (2014) asked a simple question. Can we make staff attention fun if the client does not like the staff member?
They worked with three adults with intellectual disability. Each adult ignored one staff member before the study. The team gave the staff member a bag of each client’s favorite snacks and toys. For a few minutes the staff shared these items while talking to the client. Later they tested if the client would now work to get attention from that same staff member.
What they found
After pairing, all three adults started approaching the once-disliked staff member. They also worked harder in a progressive-ratio game to earn that staff’s attention.
The effect showed up every time the pairing was repeated, and faded when pairing stopped.
How this fits with other research
The idea is old. Sainsbury (1971) first showed that a nonsense word can turn into a reinforcer when it is paired with food. Alba et al. (1972) did the same with tokens. Jared simply moves the trick from lab toys and words to real people in adult services.
Barry et al. (2019) push the idea further. They had parents run stimulus pairing at home to spark first words in toddlers with autism. Both studies show the same procedure works from early childhood to adulthood, and in homes as well as centers.
Huntington et al. (2022) seem to disagree. They found that social preference depends on who gives the assessment. That could look like a clash, but it is not. Huntington measured existing likes; Jared built new likes. The two papers together tell us to first check natural preferences, then use pairing if the best staff option is still weak.
Why it matters
You can turn any staff member into a reinforcer in about five minutes. Just pair their voice, face, and proximity with the client’s top edibles or toys. Do this before teaching new tasks or running compliance programs. The client will later work for that staff’s praise alone, cutting the need for constant food rewards and building a more natural social team.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This two-part study conducted preference assessments for staff members in three adults with intellectual disabilities and then paired attention from non-preferred staff with preferred stimuli. All three participants reliably identified preferred and non-preferred staff in both verbal and pictorial preference assessments, they emitted a higher rate responses during progressive ratio schedules for attention from preferred than from non-preferred staff and emitted more approach responses to preferred than non-preferred staff. When attention from non-preferred staff was paired with preferred stimuli, break points and the rate of approaches to non-preferred staff systematically increased as a function of stimulus pairings. The paper discusses the implications of preparing staff to work with people with intellectual disabilities.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2014 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2014.01.014