By Matt Harrington, BCBA · Behaviorist Book Club · April 2026 · 12 min read

Presession Attention and Verbal Behavior Acquisition: What BCBAs Need to Know About Tacts and Intraverbals

Overview & Clinical Significance

Verbal behavior acquisition is a cornerstone of ABA programming for children with autism, and behavior analysts devote considerable resources to teaching tacts and intraverbals as foundational communicative repertoires. What is often underappreciated, however, is how antecedent variables — specifically the motivating operations (MOs) in place before a session begins — shape how efficiently those skills are acquired.

The research by Cengher and Fienup (2020) examined exactly this question: does presession attention, delivered before formal instruction begins, affect how quickly children with autism acquire tacts and intraverbals? Across two experiments, this study demonstrates that the amount and type of attention a child receives prior to a session functions as an establishing operation (EO) or abolishing operation (AO) for attention-maintained responding — and that this has direct downstream effects on skill acquisition.

For BCBAs working in clinic, home, or school settings, this finding matters enormously. A child who receives abundant caregiver attention before arriving at a session may experience a reduced reinforcing value of therapist attention during instruction. Conversely, a child who has had little social contact before the session may respond more vigorously to therapist-delivered attention as a consequence. Both scenarios alter the effectiveness of attention as a reinforcer and, by extension, alter acquisition rates for verbal operants that are maintained by social consequences.

Understanding presession variables as a class of antecedent manipulation gives behavior analysts a new lever. Rather than only adjusting instructional design, prompting hierarchies, or consequence schedules within a session, clinicians can attend to the child's presession history as a meaningful variable. This shifts the frame from a purely within-session instructional analysis to a broader ecological view of variables that influence learning.

This course is essential for any BCBA involved in verbal behavior programming, functional behavior assessment, or supervision of RBT-delivered instruction. The implications extend beyond tacts and intraverbals to any verbal operant class whose acquisition is mediated by social reinforcement.

Background & Context

The study of verbal behavior in children with autism has deep roots in Skinner's 1957 analysis of verbal behavior, which proposed that verbal operants are distinguished by the type of antecedent control and reinforcement that maintains them. Tacts are verbal operants controlled by nonverbal discriminative stimuli (objects, events, or properties of the environment) and maintained by generalized conditioned reinforcement. Intraverbals are verbal operants controlled by verbal antecedent stimuli and maintained by social reinforcement, without a point-to-point correspondence between the verbal stimulus and the response.

Both tacts and intraverbals are frequently targeted in ABA programs for children with autism, and both rely on social consequences delivered by the instructor. Because social attention is a ubiquitous reinforcer in these contexts, the value of that attention at any given moment is subject to satiation and deprivation dynamics — precisely what motivating operations describe.

Michael's (1993) conceptualization of motivating operations as variables that alter both the reinforcing effectiveness of a stimulus and the current frequency of behavior maintained by that stimulus provides the theoretical grounding for this work. Presession attention functions as a satiation variable: a child who has received high rates of social attention before a session has, in effect, been satiated on that reinforcer. A child who has received little attention has been deprived of it, and its reinforcing value is correspondingly elevated.

Prior research had examined presession satiation in the context of problem behavior maintained by attention — the classic SRF (single reinforcer focus) studies in the functional analysis literature. The innovation of the Cengher and Fienup work is applying the same logic to skill acquisition rather than problem behavior reduction. This connection between the MO literature and verbal behavior instruction is not always made explicit in BCBA training, and it represents a meaningful integration of two bodies of research.

The participants in the study were children diagnosed with autism who were already receiving ABA services, and both experiments used within-subject reversal and alternating treatment designs — rigorous single-case methodologies well-suited to detecting the functional effects of presession attention on individual learners.

Clinical Implications

The clinical implications of this research are immediate and actionable. The first implication is that presession history should be assessed before instruction begins. BCBAs and supervising clinicians should establish a routine of gathering information about the child's recent social environment: Has the child spent the morning in a highly stimulating, attention-rich classroom? Has the child been home with a caregiver who provides frequent social interaction? These questions are not incidental — they predict whether therapist attention will function as an effective reinforcer during the session.

A practical tool for this is a brief presession checklist or parent/caregiver report form that captures the child's social context in the hour or two before each session. This information can then inform whether a brief period of attention deprivation (structured waiting without social contact) or attention satiation (delivered attention before instruction) is warranted before beginning verbal behavior targets.

The second implication concerns how BCBAs interpret skill acquisition data. When a child's performance on tact or intraverbal trials is inconsistent across sessions, practitioners often attribute variability to instructional factors: prompting inconsistency, stimulus control issues, or reinforcer potency changes in the consequence schedule. This research adds presession attention to the list of variables that should be examined as a source of unexplained variability.

For BCBAs who supervise RBTs, this finding has supervisory implications. RBTs may not recognize that a child who was highly engaged and talkative before the session has already received social satiation. Without that context, the RBT may interpret slower acquisition as a skill deficit or a motivational issue rather than a satiation effect. Teaching RBTs to note and report presession conditions as part of their data collection routine is a concrete supervisory action that follows from this research.

The third implication is for program design. If a specific verbal operant is being targeted and social attention is the primary reinforcer, BCBAs should include standardized presession conditions as part of the experimental protocol — particularly in clinical research settings. Inconsistent presession conditions may be a confound in verbal behavior studies that has gone underexamined.

Ethical Considerations

The BACB Ethics Code (2020) places client welfare and effective service delivery at the center of all clinical decisions. Code 2.01 requires that behavior analysts use assessment results to inform treatment planning, and Code 2.09 requires that behavior analysts use the most current and evidence-based methods available. The presession attention research speaks directly to these obligations by identifying an often-overlooked variable that affects learning outcomes.

If a BCBA is aware of evidence that presession satiation effects influence skill acquisition but does not incorporate this knowledge into assessment and programming, there is a reasonable argument that the practitioner is not fulfilling the obligation to use evidence-based practices in a comprehensive way. This is not a matter of negligence in the traditional sense — it is a matter of keeping the scope of one's clinical analysis broad enough to capture the variables that matter.

Code 2.14 addresses the modification of ongoing interventions. When skill acquisition data are variable or below expectations, the ethics code requires that BCBAs evaluate the program and make data-based modifications. Adding presession condition tracking to the data system is consistent with this obligation.

Supervisory ethics are also relevant here. Code 4.01 requires supervisors to ensure that supervisees are practicing within their competence and receiving adequate training. If RBTs or BCaBAs on a clinical team are unaware of presession satiation effects and how to detect and report them, this represents a gap in supervision that the BCBA of record should address.

Finally, informed consent and transparency with families (Code 2.11) are implicated when presession conditions are manipulated as part of a clinical protocol. If a clinician designs a structured presession attention deprivation condition — for example, limiting caregiver contact in the waiting area before sessions — families should understand the rationale and consent to this arrangement. What might appear to be an arbitrary procedural rule becomes clinically meaningful when explained in terms of MO manipulation, and families generally respond positively when given this scientific context.

Assessment & Decision-Making

Incorporating presession attention analysis into clinical decision-making requires a structured approach. The starting point is a functional assessment of the reinforcers maintaining the verbal operants being targeted. If therapist-delivered social attention is the primary consequence for tact and intraverbal responses, then presession attention is a relevant variable. If the program uses tangible reinforcers or edibles as the primary consequence, presession attention is likely less impactful on acquisition.

Once you have established that social attention is a driving reinforcer, the next step is to create a brief presession assessment protocol. This can be as simple as a caregiver interview at session start (taking two to three minutes) or a standardized rating scale that captures the child's social environment in the preceding hour. Some programs use a brief structured observation in the waiting area to assess the child's approach behavior toward the therapist as a proxy for current reinforcer value.

For research-oriented programs or those with high between-session variability, a more systematic approach may be warranted: conducting presession attention manipulations as a form of motivating operation assessment. This involves delivering either a period of high attention or low attention before verbal behavior trials and tracking acquisition rates across conditions using an alternating treatment design. This mirrors the methodology used by Cengher and Fienup and can yield functional data that directly informs programming.

Decision rules should be established in advance. For example: if presession caregiver contact exceeded 45 minutes of direct attention in the hour before session, implement a five-minute attention deprivation procedure before beginning intraverbal targets. If the child arrived directly from a school setting with minimal adult one-on-one interaction, begin instruction immediately without additional deprivation.

Data systems should include a presession condition variable that is recorded on every session data sheet. Over time, this variable can be analyzed in relation to within-session acquisition rates to determine whether it is a meaningful predictor for a given learner. Individual differences in sensitivity to presession MO manipulations are expected and should be treated as client-specific rather than as a universal rule.

What This Means for Your Practice

The practical takeaway from the presession attention research is that effective verbal behavior instruction is not confined to what happens during a session. The conditions leading into a session shape the motivational context in which learning occurs. BCBAs who attend only to within-session variables are working with an incomplete picture.

For practitioners running busy clinic-based programs, this may prompt a review of session scheduling and waiting area protocols. Consider whether the waiting area experience — which often involves caregivers interacting extensively with their child — is inadvertently saturating the child on social attention before instruction begins. A simple environmental modification, such as providing the child with independent play materials in the waiting area while the caregiver completes intake paperwork, may preserve the reinforcing value of therapist attention during the session.

For home-based practitioners, the presession context is harder to control but equally important to assess. Brief conversation with the caregiver at session start — asking how the morning went, whether the child had a lot of social time or a more independent morning — provides useful MO information at low cost.

For supervisors, this research provides a concrete teaching point for RBT training. Many RBTs have not been exposed to the motivating operations concept in depth, and the presession attention paradigm is an accessible, intuitive example of how MOs affect learning. Using this study as a training case helps RBTs understand why the same instructional procedure can produce different outcomes on different days with the same learner.

At the program level, BCBAs should consider adding presession condition as a tracked variable in their data systems. Even a simple categorical note (high/low presession attention) collected consistently over several weeks can reveal patterns that improve instructional decision-making. The goal is not to over-engineer every session, but to build a richer understanding of the ecological variables that make any given instructional moment more or less effective for each individual learner.