Behavioral Contrast

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Behavioral contrast occurs in a multiple schedule of reinforcement or punishment and describes what happens when a change in the schedule of one part of the reinforcement or punishment changes a behavior in an opposite direction in the other component of the schedule. An example from Applied Behavior Analysis given is that of a child who eats cookies at the same rate given the presence or absence of his grandmother.  One day, the grandmother punishes the child from eating cookies when she is present. This results in reducing the cookie eating when the grandmother is in the kitchen, but increases the cookie eating in the alternate condition of the grandmother being absent (Cooper et.al., 2007, p. 337).

Behavioral contrast is associated with multiple schedules of reinforcement which generally occurs between separate settings.

3 Ways to mitigate behavioral contrast effects:

  1. Teaching replacement behaviors
  2. Punishing all occurrences of the target behavior (all settings, all stimulus conditions, etc.)
  3. Eliminating or minimizing access to reinforcement for the problem behavior

Echoics, Mands, Tacts

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The Echoic is a verbal operant that is present when a person verbally repeats what another person says.  Echoic is a point-to-point correspondence meaning that the verbal stimulus and response products match in entirety. Motor imitation is related to echoics and can be a stepping stone to learning echoic behavior.  Echoics are a precursor to other verbal operants, such as Tact and Mand and are essential component in a learner’s verbal behavior (Cooper, Heron & Howard, 2007, p.531).

The Mand is verbal behavior where a speaker asks for something that he or she wants.  Mands occur when there is a motivating operation (MO) for something and the reinforcement is the acquisition of that thing directly related to that MO.  Mands are one of the first verbal operants acquired by a child and are essential to behavior management as learning to mand for an item can decrease undesired behaviors in order to acquire that item (Cooper et.al., 2007, p. 530).

Mand training involves moving from stimulus control to motivating operation control.

Tacts are a verbal operant where the speaker labels things in the environment.  Tacts occur when a non-verbal stimulus is presented which becomes a discriminative stimulus (Sd) via discrimination training.  When the Tact produces generalized conditioned reinforcement, it becomes under functional control of the nonverbal discriminative stimulus (Cooper et.al., 2007, p. 530).

References
Cooper, J.O., Heron, T.E., Heward, W.L., (2007) Applied Behavior Analysis Second Edition.
Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, Columbus, Ohio: Person Merrill Prentice Hall