Toward accurate inferences of response class membership
A five-minute extinction probe on each topography tells you if they all belong to the same functional response class.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Warner and team wanted a quick way to check if different problem behaviors all serve the same purpose. They worked with 10 clients who each showed two to four topographies like hitting, screaming, or throwing. First they ran a standard synthesized functional analysis. Then they ran a short extinction probe on every topography that had been included in that FA.
During the probe they withheld the usual reinforcer for five minutes and watched what happened. If every topography dropped together, the team called them one response class. The whole probe took under 30 minutes per client.
What they found
Nine out of ten times every topography fell to near zero during the extinction probe. That pattern told the team the behaviors were functionally the same response class. One client’s data stayed flat, so the question stayed open for that case.
The quick probe matched the longer FA results in every clear case. No extra sessions were needed.
How this fits with other research
Gerow et al. (2020) moved FA work into toddler homes and showed parents can run brief FAs in two to four hours. Warner keeps the brevity but stays in clinic settings and adds the extinction probe twist to confirm response class before treatment.
Fox et al. (2001) and Matson et al. (1999) validated the QABF checklist as a paper-and-pencil stand-in when analogue FAs are hard to run. Warner goes the opposite direction: they add a mini-experiment instead of a questionnaire to get firmer evidence of function.
Rajaraman et al. (2022) found that even shaky PFA reliability still led to good treatments. Warner’s probe offers a way to boost confidence in the FA itself before you write the treatment plan, closing that reliability gap.
Why it matters
You can now test response class membership in under half an hour. Run the probe right after your synthesized FA. If every topography drops, write one treatment that covers them all. If one stays high, you know to dig deeper before you lump behaviors together. This saves you from building separate plans for behaviors that actually share the same function.
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Join Free →After your next synthesized FA, withhold reinforcement for five minutes on each topography and chart the drop to confirm they share one function.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
In their review of synthesis within the functional analysis (FA) literature, Slaton and Hanley (2018) reported that most synthesized contingency analyses have included multiple topographies of problem behavior in the reinforcement contingency class. This leaves the question of whether one, some, or all forms of problem behavior are sensitive to the synthesized reinforcement contingencies in published analyses. To address this ambiguity, all topographies of problem behavior that were reported by caregivers to co-occur with the most concerning problem behavior were analyzed for 10 participants. We implemented extinction across one or more forms of problem behavior to determine whether all forms reported to co-occur were sensitive to the same synthesized reinforcement contingency. For nine of 10 participants, the most concerning topographies were sensitive to the same synthesized reinforcement contingencies as the less concerning topographies (results were inconclusive for one). Implications for inferring response class membership from single analyses are discussed.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2020 · doi:10.1002/jaba.598