On diversity in the terminology concerning inhibitory stimulus control: Implications for practitioners of applied behavior analysis.
Call every "don’t-do-it" cue "stimulus-mediated inhibition" and watch team confusion drop.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The author read every label ABA folks were using for "the stimulus that tells the learner NOT to respond."
He found more than a dozen names for the same idea. The paper says we should pick one clear term and stick with it.
What they found
No new data were collected. The paper is a map of messy vocabulary.
It recommends the phrase "stimulus-mediated inhibition" as the single, plain label for any cue that keeps behavior from happening.
How this fits with other research
Brown (2025) repeats the same clean-up job 38 years later, asking us to separate "lapse" from "relapse." Both papers chase one goal: stop the jargon soup.
Thom et al. (2026) counted how often we write "problem behavior" versus "challenging behavior." Their numbers prove the drift that Leigland (1987) warned about—terms keep splitting.
Johnson et al. (2023) did the same tidy-up inside OBM. Together these works form a family of "use-one-word" papers across ABA sub-fields.
Why it matters
When your team uses the same label for the stop cue, data sheets, graphs, and parent talk line up. Pick "stimulus-mediated inhibition" in your next meeting. Watch how fast new staff catch on.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The multiplicity of terms employed in the literature of behavior analysis to tact stimuli associated with inhibition effects is considered. It is submitted that whereas there is diversity in the conditioning histories associated with inhibitory stimulus control, there is commonality in the controlling properties invested in contiguous stimuli by those various histories. The author contends that there is heuristic value in organizing the scientific language of behavior analysts on this topic around inhibition as a process. It is further suggested that the many tacts for inhibition-related stimuli, divided as they are along what might be called procedural lines, distract from what is argued here to be the core operation, viz., stimulus mediated inhibition.
The Analysis of verbal behavior, 1987 · doi:10.1007/BF03392822