There's No Such Thing as Discriminative Stimulus Control is the kind of topic that looks straightforward until it collides with the speed, ambiguity, and competing demands of case conceptualization, intervention design, staff training, and literature-informed problem solving. In There's No Such Thing as Discriminative Stimulus Control, for this course, the practical stakes show up in stronger conceptual consistency and better translational decision making, not in abstract discussion alone.
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Join Free →Discriminative stimulus control you know. The operation is the differential correlation of a stimulus with reinforcement for a response. The outcome is an increase in the probability of the response given that stimulus. A concept you might be less familiar with is the transitive conditioned establishing operation (TCEO). Michael (1998) also referred to this as a blocked-response conditioned establishing operation. Think of the way stimuli that are part of chains can become conditioned reinforcers. The presence of stimuli correlated with one component of a chain establish stimuli correlated with the next component of the chain as reinforcers. In a classic example, imagine a worker disassembling a piece of equipment. She encounters a slotted screw and asks her apprentice to hand her a flat-head screwdriver. The slotted screw doesn't increase the probability that screwdrivers are available. Rather, it establishes the flat-head screwdriver as reinforcing and evokes behavior characteristically maintained by flat-head screw drivers. The operation here, correlating a stimulus with reinforcement for a response (i.e., the screwdriver is correlated with the screw being removed), establishes the stimulus as a reinforcer. That operation and the operation that makes a stimulus into a discriminative stimulus are eerily similar. If the discriminative stimulus establishment operation and the TCEO operation are the same, and the outcomes both entail an increase in the probability of behavior, is there utility in retaining both concepts? In this talk, we'll chat that out.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1 | General |
| COA | 1 | — |
Jason Bourret is the Clinical Director of the New England Center for Children. He teaches and has a lab with Western New England University. Jason also currently serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis.
Dig into the research behind this topic — plain-English summaries written for BCBAs.
280 research articles with practitioner takeaways
232 research articles with practitioner takeaways
225 research articles with practitioner takeaways
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