Imagine that you are teaching a young child to discriminate between two differen
ID: 3471295 • Letter: I
Question
Imagine that you are teaching a young child to discriminate between two different categories of items (you can decide what the groups consist of but make sure they are different from what I talked about in the lectures). How would you use discrimination training to teach the child to discriminate these two categories of items? Make sure to fully explain the procedure by identifying what will function as the SD, S-Delta, the target response, and the consequence.
When might it be appropriate to use prompting and how could it be accomplished? How might you fade these prompts?
Explanation / Answer
Imagine the target behavior of Juan is crying in order to get food. Juan's past history of reinforcement has led him to learn that whenever he cries whilst in the presence of his parents, his parents will give him food. In this situation, his parents serve as an SD. One day, Juan is at his Aunt’s house. In the past, his Aunt does not feed him every time he cries. The target behavior has not been reinforced. In this situation, his Aunt serves as an S?. Now, Juan must receive the SD and the S? with appropriate consequences. For instance, when Juan does not cry at his Aunt's home, then the consequence is ‘well done, good Juan!’ At home, when he cries for food, he can be told 'no, that's not the right way to behave.' If the behavior does not occur by itself then we can use prompting and these can be faded by decreasing the strength of the prompt.