Examining the effect of DRO and RIRD on behavioral momentum

Document Type

Thesis

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Psychology

Degree

M.S. Applied Behavior Analysis

Date Completed

2013

First Committee Member

Ahearn, William

Second Committee Member

Thompson, Rachel

Third Committee Member

Dickson, Chata

Abstract

"The behavioral momentum metaphor predicts the relation between rate of reinforcement and behavior’s resistance to change. Some strategies used to decrease automatically maintained behavior by adding reinforcement into the environment, might increase the behavior’s persistence at the same time, when interrupted (Ahearn, Clark, Gardenier, Chung, & Dube, 2003). This is important since treatment is often not in place throughout the day. The current study examined the effect differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO) and response interruption/redirection (RIRD) have on behavioral persistence once the treatment is no longer in place. The participants were three young men diagnosed with autism who engaged in automatically maintained stereotypy. We found that DRO decreased stereotypy for one participant, reduced stereotypy only slightly for the second one, and was not effective with the third one. RIRD decreased stereotypy significantly for all three participants. Our behavioral momentum evaluation demonstrated that DRO did not seem to increase persistence of stereotypy and resulted in less persistence than RIRD. Persistence was higher following RIRD than control for one participant and slightly lower for the other two."

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