Document Type

Dissertation

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Psychology

Degree

PhD in Behavior Analysis

Dissertation Defense Date

2026-09-16

First Committee Member

Thompson, Rachel

Second Committee Member

Dickson, Chata

Third Committee Member

Bourret, Jason

Additional Committee Member(s)

Kwak, Daniel

Abstract

The integration of choice-making opportunities into behavior analytic treatment has produced improvements in the lives of individuals with autism. Although researchers have focused on improving staff presentation of choice-making opportunities (Van der Meer et al., 2017), this approach places choice-making under the stimulus control of staff initiations and may result in missed opportunities for the child to make choices when it is most valuable to them. We evaluated the effectiveness of a mand training procedure to teach individuals with autism to request choice-making opportunities. Single trials were interspersed into participants’ typical treatment programming and contexts were designed to establish the value of a choice-making opportunity. Echoic or gestural prompts were used to teach independent mands, and motivational control was evaluated by comparing responding on establishing operation (EO) trials and abolishing operation (AO) probes. Five participants acquired the mand in at least one targeted context, and two participants continued to mand in a novel context. All participants manded almost exclusively during EO trials, confirming that the response was trained as a mand. This study extends the mand training and choice literature by teaching individuals with autism to independently mand for opportunities to choose beyond staff-recognized opportunities. Our methods validated an arrangement of variables that establish the opportunity to choose as conditioned reinforcement and identified antecedent variables that determined the form and increased the likelihood of occurrence of the mand for choice-making opportunities.

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