Understanding Stimulus Control in Behavior

So let's talk about something called stimulus control. This is the anatomy of behavior. This is how behavior works. We've talked about reinforcement as a consequence that maintains and strengthens behavior. So we also have to look at some of the antecedents to behavior. So antecedents are the things that come just before. Consequences are the things that come just after. What's most important is a consequence. that reinforcement in particular for behaviors that are occurring and strengthening is most relevant. But there are things in the environment that signal when reinforcement would be available and which behavior you should use to get it. So reinforcement, it's a stimulus happens after a behavior, it's the addition or subtraction of something and increases the probability of behavior. But how do we know when the right time is to do it? do that behavior? How do we know which behavior will result in reinforcement? And those two questions are really the same question. Once you really understand behavior, you know that the behavior is occurring for reinforcement, be it adding something or subtracting something, be it subtle or explicit, it's still reinforcement. And so in any given situation, we need to know which behavior to use in order to maximize that particular situation. So let's look at this example here. We have an individual saying hi. So the person says hi. So we approach that individual and we reciprocate. We say hi as well. Now in this situation, what happened was that one individual, another person said hi. We'll call that blue shirt. Blue shirt said hi. And so we'll be orange shirt. We experienced that stimulus that we saw and we heard blue shirt say hi and so our behavior is that we said hi back. That stimulus, the blue shirt stimulus, had some control over our behavior but it had control because there's a history of reinforcement for a behavior in the presence of that stimuli. So in the presence of that stimuli, blue shirt saying hi We know what behavior we should do in order to maximize reinforcement, which is to just reciprocate. If you don't reciprocate, you know, there could be some negative social consequences that we could see. Blue shirt could get upset. It could start to frown. It could not want to talk to us again. And there are certainly some positive things that happened after we said hi. Maybe we're engaging a good conversation with this person. We got their attention. we like being around them. So there's positives as well as negatives. But the fact is that we said hi because that individual was there, they said hi, and that tells us how we should respond in order to maximize reinforcement. So that's stimulus control. The control came from this history of reinforcement for a behavior in the presence of that particular stimulus. This is called stimulus control. So anytime we select a behavior, we engage in a behavior, we're engaging in that behavior because the stimulus conditions dictate that based on our own history of what has happened in the past when we are in the presence of those stimulus conditions. All right, so let's see if you can do this independently. When an antecedent stimulus comes to exert power over a behavior due to a history of reinforcement, it is called, right, stimulus control. Actually, I'm trying to have some stimulus control right here. I am putting out this stimulus when an antecedent stimulus comes to exert power over a behavior due to a history of reinforcement, it is called. That's a stimulus that I'm putting out there. And I want that to have some control over your behavior, which was to select answer B, stimulus control. So stimulus control, sometimes a stimulus can signal the availability of reinforcement for a particular behavior. So a stimulus has stimulus control because it signals what behavior you should do in this. set of stimulus conditions in order to maximize reinforcement, but sometimes stimuli signal that reinforcement won't be available. So you can kind of have it both ways. You can have stimuli that signal that reinforcement will be available for a particular behavior, but you might also have stimuli that signal that reinforcement will not be available for a particular behavior. And sometimes you have both happening at the same time, where a stimulus is telling you what you can and should do, but the stimulus also tells you what you shouldn't do, and it's all based on this history of reinforcement. So let's say we're here again and we're orange shirt and we see the stimulus blue shirt And so we don't wait for him to say anything this time. We just go ahead and say hi unfortunately, the response we get from blue shirt is Whatever so we say hi they say whatever if that happens to us enough Eventually blue shirt is going to signal to us that no reinforcement is available for saying hi. If we had a history of reinforcement for saying hi, which we probably did, and we said it, and he said whatever, we might actually undergo extinction. You remember that from last time? So normally we would do a behavior like say hi in order to get that individual's attention and to get them to reciprocate. When that stopped happening, then we might undergo an extinction burst. We might start varying our behavior a little bit. We might start asking them some questions trying to figure out why they said whatever. But if they said whatever every time, eventually they would signal that reinforcement is not available. So in that example, in the presence of this stimuli, the behavior high will not be reinforced. Again, if that happened over and over again, we would stop doing that behavior because it wouldn't result in reinforcement. So when we get to the point where we're trying to actually use this to understand behavior, but also to treat and change behavior, we have to be technical and precise about the stimuli that we're discussing. And for that reason, we need technical terms and definitions. Here's a couple that involve stimulus control. The SD and the S-delta. Stimuli that signal the availability of reinforcement are called discriminative stimuli. Discriminative stimuli, or an SD as it's also called, signal the availability of reinforcement given a particular behavior. So it's a set of stimuli that tell you how to behave in order to maximize reinforcement. It's technically written as SD with D being a superscript or the little tiny symbol near the top. Stimuli that signal the absence of reinforcement for a given behavior are called a stimulus delta or S delta. And technically written, it's S with the superscript of a little triangle. Greek Delta sign. So the SD signals the availability of reinforcement and S Delta signals the unavailability of reinforcement, both relevant to a particular behavior. So if I see a stimuli, like say a blue car and somebody says, what color is that? That's going to be an SD. That's going to be stimuli that signal to me. what behavior I should engage in in order to maximize reinforcement. And it did so based on my own personal history. So if there's the blue car and they say, what color is that car? I'm going to say blue. Their asking me was an SD, a discriminative stimulus. It signaled what behavior I should engage in. And that behavior would be to say blue. So this is really important because it tells you how to maximize reinforcement and is involved in the selection of behaviors constantly throughout our day and our life. The scrimmative stimulus is an antecedent stimulus, comes before the behavior, and it signals the availability of reinforcement for a specific behavior. The SD, or discriminative stimulus, is a stimulus in the presence of which certain responses have been reinforced, and that's where it tells you what behavior to do. When this stimulus is there, if you act in this particular way, you're more likely to maximize reinforcement. So this goes with any behavior that we're doing throughout the day. Anything that we're doing has some signal that tells us that if you do this behavior now, it will be reinforcing. So it could be something relative to you guys like studying, right? It could be available. So you could have your... book available and you would know that when your book's available, you can open it up and read it and that will result in a certain type of reinforcement. Now, it might not be a powerful enough reinforcement reinforcer to get you to act in that moment. That would have more to do with motivation, which we'll talk about later in ABA 2, but the fact is it is available. So it signals availability of reinforcement. Stimulus has been correlated with the reinforcer if the right behavior occurs. Let me give you some examples in working with children and adolescents. So let's look at example one. When Miss Johnson is present, if the student screams, the student will be sent to the office. So here we have a behavior, student screaming. We have an antecedent and we have a consequence. Consequence, a student will be sent to the office. So if that chain of events happened over and over again, we would assume that being sent to the office actually acted as a reinforcer for the behavior of screaming. But what would it be that signaled the availability of that reinforcer and taught the individual how to act? Well, it would be Ms. Johnson. Because when Ms. Johnson is present, if they scream, they get sent to the office. So if we're trying to figure out what stimuli are signaling to the student to behave in a particular way, we would look and we'd see that Ms. Johnson was the consistent variable. And so we would assume that that was the SD. Now, once the student gets sent to the office, we might have this scenario. When they're in the office, if Mr. Rhodes is present, he always calls the kid's mom, right? If he runs away. So if he runs away, once he gets to the office and Mr. Rhodes is present, Mr. Rhodes will call the parents. So under those stimulus conditions, imagine this, the student is in the office and Mr. Rhodes is there. Those are stimulus conditions. Those are things that the student can see. Under those conditions, that student simply needs to run. away out of the office and that will result in the student's parent being called. If we saw that scenario play out over and over again, then we would assume that the parent being called was actually acting as a reinforcer for the student running. But we would also look at what signaled that that was available and we might see that over and over again it was the presence of Mr. Rhodes. Maybe Mr. Rhodes is the one that calls. the parent. So Mr. Rhodes is actually signaling the availability of the parent being called and therefore has some power over getting the student to run away. Now once the student's parent is called, if the student cries, the student will get picked up by the parent. So now we have a new set of stimulus conditions that have come about. If the student is able to see that their parent is being called. That's just stimuli that they would be able to hear and see. When that stimulus is present, if the student starts crying in that moment, then the parent will come pick them up. And again, if we see this scenario happen over and over again, and the parent coming picking them up, we can infer is a reinforcer. So that's how SDs work or these discriminative stimuli. They signal what behavior we should engage in in order to maximize reinforcement. Now, when I say what behavior we should engage in, it's not always that it's adaptive or helpful. It may be better for them to engage in other behaviors, but the environment has taught them that this way is actually reinforcing for them. Woo! presence of the parent is acting as a discriminative stimulus or SD for crying. So the child knows that if that stimulus is there they can see the parent then crying will actually result in reinforcement and this is likely due to a reinforcement history where crying has resulted in some form of attention from the parent and that happened over and over again. So the parents presence actually becomes a signal for crying in order to get the reinforcer of attention. So it's an SD for crying. Likewise, the absence of the parent is an S-delta. If the stimuli include everything but the parent, then there's nothing indicating that that behavior would work or that reinforcement's available, so the crying stops. We often train a specific SD to have stimulus control. In fact, that's what education really is. It's about a series of SDs that we want to have control over certain behaviors. A simple example of this is somebody saying, what is 2 plus 2? That's a stimulus that can be sensed. Under those stimulus conditions, somebody saying what is 2 plus 2, we want a particular behavior to occur. We want the individual to say 4. The consequence, you solved a problem that was probably valuable to solve. You got it right, perhaps getting it right in the presence of others. That can act as a reinforcer. And then sometimes we'll even add extra reinforcers in there. Because the whole situation is new and there's not a powerful reinforcement history so we can put another reinforcer in there to act as a placeholder To try to get more reinforcement and then we can remove that reinforcement So this is an SD, but this is one that would be trained because we want that stimulus to control this behavior saying for. And it does so by signaling the availability of this reinforcer. Here's another example. And, you know, the examples of behavioral science are all around us if we just kind of look. And so here's an example of really what we're doing right now. I have an SD. which would be somebody saying, what do we call antecedent stimuli that exert power over behavior as a result of a reinforcement history? The behavior would be stimulus control. So I have a set of conditions that I want to set up as an SD for you saying stimulus control. The consequence is you're solving a problem, you're getting it right. Hopefully that leads to a better grade and there might be some other reinforcers happening there as well. But there's a specific stimulus that I want to result in a particular behavior. And then hopefully you do it because that would maximize reinforcement by allowing you to understand, being able to move on to learning how to actually treat people, being able to get a good grade and so on. So here you want this stimulus to control this behavior. And it does so by signaling the availability of a particular reinforcer. Again, solving the problem, being able to help clients when this is relevant, and so on. So the SD is really powerful in education. So we often have SDs that are simply instructions or questions. And we use this whenever we're doing intensive teaching and behavior analysis. So there is a lot of behavior analysis that's used to teach children different skills, especially children with developmental disabilities. But it's used in businesses, higher level types of instruction. There was a symposium at the last conference I went to where they were using. this to train surgical interns in how to identify different conditions. So it's used for a lot of different things, but we definitely see it used a lot in intensive teaching with younger kids. And it's important because when you're delivering an instruction, understanding that idea of the SD really helps you to get precise about how you're presenting material so that it's most likely going to lead to the right behavior. But a very simple instruction in using an SD would be what goes moo in a child, teaching a child to say a cow, right? So what goes moo would be the SD. That would be the stimuli that we want to control the behavior. then the behavior would be them saying cow and then hopefully that would lead to some sort of reinforcement. So here's a few different examples here where we're getting more into the applied phase. So let's say that Miss James is present and child tries to grab and scratch. Miss James blocks and holds the child. If we were analyzing this situation, what we would do is we would see first the behavior of interest is grabbing and scratching. The consequence is Ms. James blocking and holding. So we would assume that that is serving some sort of reinforcement function, probably just through the attention that is given. What would be consistent as an antecedent would be Ms. James. So our hypothesis here would be that Ms. James is signaling the availability of reinforcement if the child engages in that particular behavior of grabbing and scratching. So Ms. James would be an SD for grabbing and scratching. Likewise, we might have the same child, but they don't grab and scratch Ms. Ellis. And if we analyze that situation, We might see that when Miss Ellis is present, the child looks at Miss Ellis, and Miss Ellis frequently praises that looking. So if we analyze this situation, Miss Ellis is an SD. She signals the availability of reinforcement. This time, the reinforcement is praise, which is a form of attention, but it is an SD for the child looking at the teacher rather than grabbing. So through the learning history with Miss Ellis, if you look at her when she's present, she will deliver reinforcement. So she is an SD for looking, whereas Miss James is an SD for grabbing and scratching. Here's another example. Jessica walks into her kitchen after arriving home from work, gulps down some vodka, and feels and observes her stress dissipating. So we have a situation where we have an SD and it would be that stimuli that are available signaling the availability of stress reduction. So it'd be her kitchen, bottle of vodka, just being home. Engages in a behavior, gulping down the vodka. And that behavior ends up being reinforced by subtracting some of the stress that she was feeling. Now we have another situation where Megan walks into her kitchen after arriving from work. She has this other behavior that she's done. and has been successful and thus reinforced, where she sits quietly and observes her breath for 10 minutes. The result is that the stress dissipates. So the same type of functional outcome as Jessica, but there's just a different reinforcement history here. Megan walks into her kitchen after arriving home from work, so it's the same stimulus conditions. So it's the same type of SD, the kitchen, after work, at home, all of those stimuli. signal the availability of reinforcement, getting rid of the stress, for engaging in the behavior, sitting quietly and observing her breath. So the SDs in our environment can act as signals to engage in behaviors that may be maladaptive. And so in a therapeutic setting, what we have to do is to try to transfer that control from one behavior another. Now that's easier said than done, but a starting point is definitely going to be identifying what those antecedent stimuli are. You have to know what those stimuli are if you're going to be precise and careful about teaching a new behavior in the presence of those stimuli. So sometimes ESD exerts control over the wrong behavior, a maladaptive behavior, and so sometimes therapists have to help transfer the control from one behavior to another. In order to do this, we have to identify precisely the SD. We have to be very precise about it, make sure we're getting all the relevant stimuli. So I say we have to help them transfer the control from one behavior to another, and we actually call this a transfer of stimulus control. So in Jessica's case, we have stimulus control over arriving home from work, over her kitchen and everything in her kitchen and being at home. That has control over gulping down vodka. We need to figure out how we can slowly transfer that in a way she can be successful to get her to do something else that's going to result in the same type of consequence, but is going to be a more adaptive way to go about it. So, like I said, our everyday life has plenty of examples of behavioral science, so just think about the different behaviors that you do, and then try to identify some of the SDs that might be involved. If it's something that we want, if we're doing something that we want, that thing we want can actually be the SD. Sometimes it's just that simple. But there might be other stimuli in the environment exerting some control over our behavior. Because when that stimuli has been present in the past, we've gotten reinforced for the behavior. So here's some really common ones. So you take a seat in a classroom. That's a behavior. What's the SD? Sometimes you can't overthink these. The SD could simply be the classroom, the tables, the chairs, other people sitting. All of those things you could have a history of that tells you what to do. And the reinforcer doesn't have to be huge. It's not like, you know, balloons are brought out and confetti is shot everywhere when you sit in a chair. But some minor things happen. It's a little bit relaxing to sit instead of stand. Also, it might be odd if you are the only one standing, right? And so for that reason, you're avoiding that particular situation. Here's another one, behavior. You push the ignition button on your car. What's the SD? So something in the environment is signaling that this is the right time to push that button in order to maximize reinforcement. So the first thing could be just seeing the button. I'm sitting in my car and I see the button. Now I can push it. The ultimate reinforcer being getting to where I'm trying to go. It could also be something like maybe you have a remote start. And it's a cold day and you see that it's 8 o'clock, you need to leave at 8.15, you want your car to be warm, and so you know... that I need to push that button when it says 815 on the clock if I'm going to hope to go into a warm car. Let's look at this one. You say, what's wrong, to a friend. Under what conditions would you say that to a friend? You'd probably do it under conditions where the friend looked upset. So the friend looking upset, looking sad, maybe crying, being by themselves, those are stimulus conditions that you are sensing, that you're seeing, and that stimulus condition, that antecedent stimulus condition, can produce the behavior of you saying, what's wrong? And think about it. What's the reinforcer there? The reinforcer is to get the information about what's wrong and to possibly help and make that stimulus of the sadness go away or turn into something where they look more content. So them being upset is a stimulus that evokes a behavior, you saying what's wrong, in order to help them deal with that situation. So stimulus control. This is the final piece of our basics of how behavior works, and it's that, and it actually comes as an antecedent to the behavior. It's stimuli that exert some power over the behavior because they've been correlated with that behavior and reinforcement in the past. When that stimuli is there, I engage in this behavior because it maximizes reinforcement. You may notice I've had a couple of stoplights as graphics on the presentation because it's a really basic clear-cut example of stimulus control. When that green light is lit, I go. Then I can get to where I'm going. When the red light is lit, I stop because I don't want to get into a crash or get a ticket. There are signals in the environment. that allow me to maximize reinforcement. An SD signals the availability of reinforcement for a particular behavior. An SDelta signals the unavailability of reinforcement for a particular behavior. So a green light is an SD for go, but it's an SDelta for stopping. A red light is an SD for stopping, holding my foot on the brake. but it's an S-delta for putting my foot on the gas. So that's stimulus control. It's this, stimulus control is this power that is exerted by a stimuli because of its relevance to a behavior and reinforcement. And the two types of things that we talk about within stimulus control are the SD that signals availability and the S-delta that signals unavailability. Now this is a complicated concept to grasp, so be sure that you read through your text. You might even want to watch this or review it a little bit to really try to hit home a few of the concepts. Okay, that's it. If you have any questions about stimulus control, let me know, and of course we'll be able to talk about it in our class sessions.

So antecedents are the things that come just before. Consequences are the things that come just after. What's most important is a consequence. that reinforcement in particular for behaviors that are occurring and strengthening is most relevant.

But there are things in the environment that signal when reinforcement would be available and which behavior you should use to get it. So reinforcement, it's a stimulus happens after a behavior, it's the addition or subtraction of something and increases the probability of behavior. But how do we know when the right time is to do it? do that behavior? How do we know which behavior will result in reinforcement?

And those two questions are really the same question. Once you really understand behavior, you know that the behavior is occurring for reinforcement, be it adding something or subtracting something, be it subtle or explicit, it's still reinforcement. And so in any given situation, we need to know which behavior to use in order to maximize that particular situation.

So let's look at this example here. We have an individual saying hi. So the person says hi.

So we approach that individual and we reciprocate. We say hi as well. Now in this situation, what happened was that one individual, another person said hi.

We'll call that blue shirt. Blue shirt said hi. And so we'll be orange shirt.

We experienced that stimulus that we saw and we heard blue shirt say hi and so our behavior is that we said hi back. That stimulus, the blue shirt stimulus, had some control over our behavior but it had control because there's a history of reinforcement for a behavior in the presence of that stimuli. So in the presence of that stimuli, blue shirt saying hi We know what behavior we should do in order to maximize reinforcement, which is to just reciprocate.

If you don't reciprocate, you know, there could be some negative social consequences that we could see. Blue shirt could get upset. It could start to frown. It could not want to talk to us again.

And there are certainly some positive things that happened after we said hi. Maybe we're engaging a good conversation with this person. We got their attention.

we like being around them. So there's positives as well as negatives. But the fact is that we said hi because that individual was there, they said hi, and that tells us how we should respond in order to maximize reinforcement. So that's stimulus control. The control came from this history of reinforcement for a behavior in the presence of that particular stimulus.

This is called stimulus control. So anytime we select a behavior, we engage in a behavior, we're engaging in that behavior because the stimulus conditions dictate that based on our own history of what has happened in the past when we are in the presence of those stimulus conditions. All right, so let's see if you can do this independently. When an antecedent stimulus comes to exert power over a behavior due to a history of reinforcement, it is called, right, stimulus control.

Actually, I'm trying to have some stimulus control right here. I am putting out this stimulus when an antecedent stimulus comes to exert power over a behavior due to a history of reinforcement, it is called. That's a stimulus that I'm putting out there.

And I want that to have some control over your behavior, which was to select answer B, stimulus control. So stimulus control, sometimes a stimulus can signal the availability of reinforcement for a particular behavior. So a stimulus has stimulus control because it signals what behavior you should do in this. set of stimulus conditions in order to maximize reinforcement, but sometimes stimuli signal that reinforcement won't be available. So you can kind of have it both ways.

You can have stimuli that signal that reinforcement will be available for a particular behavior, but you might also have stimuli that signal that reinforcement will not be available for a particular behavior. And sometimes you have both happening at the same time, where a stimulus is telling you what you can and should do, but the stimulus also tells you what you shouldn't do, and it's all based on this history of reinforcement. So let's say we're here again and we're orange shirt and we see the stimulus blue shirt And so we don't wait for him to say anything this time. We just go ahead and say hi unfortunately, the response we get from blue shirt is Whatever so we say hi they say whatever if that happens to us enough Eventually blue shirt is going to signal to us that no reinforcement is available for saying hi. If we had a history of reinforcement for saying hi, which we probably did, and we said it, and he said whatever, we might actually undergo extinction.

You remember that from last time? So normally we would do a behavior like say hi in order to get that individual's attention and to get them to reciprocate. When that stopped happening, then we might undergo an extinction burst. We might start varying our behavior a little bit.

We might start asking them some questions trying to figure out why they said whatever. But if they said whatever every time, eventually they would signal that reinforcement is not available. So in that example, in the presence of this stimuli, the behavior high will not be reinforced. Again, if that happened over and over again, we would stop doing that behavior because it wouldn't result in reinforcement.

So when we get to the point where we're trying to actually use this to understand behavior, but also to treat and change behavior, we have to be technical and precise about the stimuli that we're discussing. And for that reason, we need technical terms and definitions. Here's a couple that involve stimulus control.

The SD and the S-delta. Stimuli that signal the availability of reinforcement are called discriminative stimuli. Discriminative stimuli, or an SD as it's also called, signal the availability of reinforcement given a particular behavior. So it's a set of stimuli that tell you how to behave in order to maximize reinforcement. It's technically written as SD with D being a superscript or the little tiny symbol near the top.

Stimuli that signal the absence of reinforcement for a given behavior are called a stimulus delta or S delta. And technically written, it's S with the superscript of a little triangle. Greek Delta sign.

So the SD signals the availability of reinforcement and S Delta signals the unavailability of reinforcement, both relevant to a particular behavior. So if I see a stimuli, like say a blue car and somebody says, what color is that? That's going to be an SD. That's going to be stimuli that signal to me. what behavior I should engage in in order to maximize reinforcement. And it did so based on my own personal history.

So if there's the blue car and they say, what color is that car? I'm going to say blue. Their asking me was an SD, a discriminative stimulus.

It signaled what behavior I should engage in. And that behavior would be to say blue. So this is really important because it tells you how to maximize reinforcement and is involved in the selection of behaviors constantly throughout our day and our life. The scrimmative stimulus is an antecedent stimulus, comes before the behavior, and it signals the availability of reinforcement for a specific behavior.

The SD, or discriminative stimulus, is a stimulus in the presence of which certain responses have been reinforced, and that's where it tells you what behavior to do. When this stimulus is there, if you act in this particular way, you're more likely to maximize reinforcement. So this goes with any behavior that we're doing throughout the day. Anything that we're doing has some signal that tells us that if you do this behavior now, it will be reinforcing. So it could be something relative to you guys like studying, right?

It could be available. So you could have your... book available and you would know that when your book's available, you can open it up and read it and that will result in a certain type of reinforcement. Now, it might not be a powerful enough reinforcement reinforcer to get you to act in that moment.

That would have more to do with motivation, which we'll talk about later in ABA 2, but the fact is it is available. So it signals availability of reinforcement. Stimulus has been correlated with the reinforcer if the right behavior occurs. Let me give you some examples in working with children and adolescents. So let's look at example one.

When Miss Johnson is present, if the student screams, the student will be sent to the office. So here we have a behavior, student screaming. We have an antecedent and we have a consequence. Consequence, a student will be sent to the office. So if that chain of events happened over and over again, we would assume that being sent to the office actually acted as a reinforcer for the behavior of screaming.

But what would it be that signaled the availability of that reinforcer and taught the individual how to act? Well, it would be Ms. Johnson. Because when Ms. Johnson is present, if they scream, they get sent to the office. So if we're trying to figure out what stimuli are signaling to the student to behave in a particular way, we would look and we'd see that Ms. Johnson was the consistent variable.

And so we would assume that that was the SD. Now, once the student gets sent to the office, we might have this scenario. When they're in the office, if Mr. Rhodes is present, he always calls the kid's mom, right? If he runs away. So if he runs away, once he gets to the office and Mr. Rhodes is present, Mr. Rhodes will call the parents.

So under those stimulus conditions, imagine this, the student is in the office and Mr. Rhodes is there. Those are stimulus conditions. Those are things that the student can see.

Under those conditions, that student simply needs to run. away out of the office and that will result in the student's parent being called. If we saw that scenario play out over and over again, then we would assume that the parent being called was actually acting as a reinforcer for the student running.

But we would also look at what signaled that that was available and we might see that over and over again it was the presence of Mr. Rhodes. Maybe Mr. Rhodes is the one that calls. the parent. So Mr. Rhodes is actually signaling the availability of the parent being called and therefore has some power over getting the student to run away.

Now once the student's parent is called, if the student cries, the student will get picked up by the parent. So now we have a new set of stimulus conditions that have come about. If the student is able to see that their parent is being called.

That's just stimuli that they would be able to hear and see. When that stimulus is present, if the student starts crying in that moment, then the parent will come pick them up. And again, if we see this scenario happen over and over again, and the parent coming picking them up, we can infer is a reinforcer. So that's how SDs work or these discriminative stimuli.

They signal what behavior we should engage in in order to maximize reinforcement. Now, when I say what behavior we should engage in, it's not always that it's adaptive or helpful. It may be better for them to engage in other behaviors, but the environment has taught them that this way is actually reinforcing for them.

Woo! presence of the parent is acting as a discriminative stimulus or SD for crying. So the child knows that if that stimulus is there they can see the parent then crying will actually result in reinforcement and this is likely due to a reinforcement history where crying has resulted in some form of attention from the parent and that happened over and over again. So the parents presence actually becomes a signal for crying in order to get the reinforcer of attention.

So it's an SD for crying. Likewise, the absence of the parent is an S-delta. If the stimuli include everything but the parent, then there's nothing indicating that that behavior would work or that reinforcement's available, so the crying stops. We often train a specific SD to have stimulus control.

In fact, that's what education really is. It's about a series of SDs that we want to have control over certain behaviors. A simple example of this is somebody saying, what is 2 plus 2? That's a stimulus that can be sensed. Under those stimulus conditions, somebody saying what is 2 plus 2, we want a particular behavior to occur.

We want the individual to say 4. The consequence, you solved a problem that was probably valuable to solve. You got it right, perhaps getting it right in the presence of others. That can act as a reinforcer. And then sometimes we'll even add extra reinforcers in there.

Because the whole situation is new and there's not a powerful reinforcement history so we can put another reinforcer in there to act as a placeholder To try to get more reinforcement and then we can remove that reinforcement So this is an SD, but this is one that would be trained because we want that stimulus to control this behavior saying for. And it does so by signaling the availability of this reinforcer. Here's another example.

And, you know, the examples of behavioral science are all around us if we just kind of look. And so here's an example of really what we're doing right now. I have an SD.

which would be somebody saying, what do we call antecedent stimuli that exert power over behavior as a result of a reinforcement history? The behavior would be stimulus control. So I have a set of conditions that I want to set up as an SD for you saying stimulus control. The consequence is you're solving a problem, you're getting it right.

Hopefully that leads to a better grade and there might be some other reinforcers happening there as well. But there's a specific stimulus that I want to result in a particular behavior. And then hopefully you do it because that would maximize reinforcement by allowing you to understand, being able to move on to learning how to actually treat people, being able to get a good grade and so on. So here you want this stimulus to control this behavior. And it does so by signaling the availability of a particular reinforcer.

Again, solving the problem, being able to help clients when this is relevant, and so on. So the SD is really powerful in education. So we often have SDs that are simply instructions or questions. And we use this whenever we're doing intensive teaching and behavior analysis. So there is a lot of behavior analysis that's used to teach children different skills, especially children with developmental disabilities.

But it's used in businesses, higher level types of instruction. There was a symposium at the last conference I went to where they were using. this to train surgical interns in how to identify different conditions. So it's used for a lot of different things, but we definitely see it used a lot in intensive teaching with younger kids.

And it's important because when you're delivering an instruction, understanding that idea of the SD really helps you to get precise about how you're presenting material so that it's most likely going to lead to the right behavior. But a very simple instruction in using an SD would be what goes moo in a child, teaching a child to say a cow, right? So what goes moo would be the SD.

That would be the stimuli that we want to control the behavior. then the behavior would be them saying cow and then hopefully that would lead to some sort of reinforcement. So here's a few different examples here where we're getting more into the applied phase.

So let's say that Miss James is present and child tries to grab and scratch. Miss James blocks and holds the child. If we were analyzing this situation, what we would do is we would see first the behavior of interest is grabbing and scratching.

The consequence is Ms. James blocking and holding. So we would assume that that is serving some sort of reinforcement function, probably just through the attention that is given. What would be consistent as an antecedent would be Ms. James. So our hypothesis here would be that Ms. James is signaling the availability of reinforcement if the child engages in that particular behavior of grabbing and scratching. So Ms. James would be an SD for grabbing and scratching.

Likewise, we might have the same child, but they don't grab and scratch Ms. Ellis. And if we analyze that situation, We might see that when Miss Ellis is present, the child looks at Miss Ellis, and Miss Ellis frequently praises that looking. So if we analyze this situation, Miss Ellis is an SD. She signals the availability of reinforcement.

This time, the reinforcement is praise, which is a form of attention, but it is an SD for the child looking at the teacher rather than grabbing. So through the learning history with Miss Ellis, if you look at her when she's present, she will deliver reinforcement. So she is an SD for looking, whereas Miss James is an SD for grabbing and scratching.

Here's another example. Jessica walks into her kitchen after arriving home from work, gulps down some vodka, and feels and observes her stress dissipating. So we have a situation where we have an SD and it would be that stimuli that are available signaling the availability of stress reduction. So it'd be her kitchen, bottle of vodka, just being home. Engages in a behavior, gulping down the vodka.

And that behavior ends up being reinforced by subtracting some of the stress that she was feeling. Now we have another situation where Megan walks into her kitchen after arriving from work. She has this other behavior that she's done.

and has been successful and thus reinforced, where she sits quietly and observes her breath for 10 minutes. The result is that the stress dissipates. So the same type of functional outcome as Jessica, but there's just a different reinforcement history here.

Megan walks into her kitchen after arriving home from work, so it's the same stimulus conditions. So it's the same type of SD, the kitchen, after work, at home, all of those stimuli. signal the availability of reinforcement, getting rid of the stress, for engaging in the behavior, sitting quietly and observing her breath.

So the SDs in our environment can act as signals to engage in behaviors that may be maladaptive. And so in a therapeutic setting, what we have to do is to try to transfer that control from one behavior another. Now that's easier said than done, but a starting point is definitely going to be identifying what those antecedent stimuli are.

You have to know what those stimuli are if you're going to be precise and careful about teaching a new behavior in the presence of those stimuli. So sometimes ESD exerts control over the wrong behavior, a maladaptive behavior, and so sometimes therapists have to help transfer the control from one behavior to another. In order to do this, we have to identify precisely the SD.

We have to be very precise about it, make sure we're getting all the relevant stimuli. So I say we have to help them transfer the control from one behavior to another, and we actually call this a transfer of stimulus control. So in Jessica's case, we have stimulus control over arriving home from work, over her kitchen and everything in her kitchen and being at home. That has control over gulping down vodka.

We need to figure out how we can slowly transfer that in a way she can be successful to get her to do something else that's going to result in the same type of consequence, but is going to be a more adaptive way to go about it. So, like I said, our everyday life has plenty of examples of behavioral science, so just think about the different behaviors that you do, and then try to identify some of the SDs that might be involved. If it's something that we want, if we're doing something that we want, that thing we want can actually be the SD.

Sometimes it's just that simple. But there might be other stimuli in the environment exerting some control over our behavior. Because when that stimuli has been present in the past, we've gotten reinforced for the behavior.

So here's some really common ones. So you take a seat in a classroom. That's a behavior.

What's the SD? Sometimes you can't overthink these. The SD could simply be the classroom, the tables, the chairs, other people sitting.

All of those things you could have a history of that tells you what to do. And the reinforcer doesn't have to be huge. It's not like, you know, balloons are brought out and confetti is shot everywhere when you sit in a chair.

But some minor things happen. It's a little bit relaxing to sit instead of stand. Also, it might be odd if you are the only one standing, right? And so for that reason, you're avoiding that particular situation. Here's another one, behavior.

You push the ignition button on your car. What's the SD? So something in the environment is signaling that this is the right time to push that button in order to maximize reinforcement.

So the first thing could be just seeing the button. I'm sitting in my car and I see the button. Now I can push it.

The ultimate reinforcer being getting to where I'm trying to go. It could also be something like maybe you have a remote start. And it's a cold day and you see that it's 8 o'clock, you need to leave at 8.15, you want your car to be warm, and so you know... that I need to push that button when it says 815 on the clock if I'm going to hope to go into a warm car. Let's look at this one.

You say, what's wrong, to a friend. Under what conditions would you say that to a friend? You'd probably do it under conditions where the friend looked upset. So the friend looking upset, looking sad, maybe crying, being by themselves, those are stimulus conditions that you are sensing, that you're seeing, and that stimulus condition, that antecedent stimulus condition, can produce the behavior of you saying, what's wrong? And think about it.

What's the reinforcer there? The reinforcer is to get the information about what's wrong and to possibly help and make that stimulus of the sadness go away or turn into something where they look more content. So them being upset is a stimulus that evokes a behavior, you saying what's wrong, in order to help them deal with that situation.

So stimulus control. This is the final piece of our basics of how behavior works, and it's that, and it actually comes as an antecedent to the behavior. It's stimuli that exert some power over the behavior because they've been correlated with that behavior and reinforcement in the past. When that stimuli is there, I engage in this behavior because it maximizes reinforcement.

You may notice I've had a couple of stoplights as graphics on the presentation because it's a really basic clear-cut example of stimulus control. When that green light is lit, I go. Then I can get to where I'm going. When the red light is lit, I stop because I don't want to get into a crash or get a ticket.

There are signals in the environment. that allow me to maximize reinforcement. An SD signals the availability of reinforcement for a particular behavior.

An SDelta signals the unavailability of reinforcement for a particular behavior. So a green light is an SD for go, but it's an SDelta for stopping. A red light is an SD for stopping, holding my foot on the brake.

but it's an S-delta for putting my foot on the gas. So that's stimulus control. It's this, stimulus control is this power that is exerted by a stimuli because of its relevance to a behavior and reinforcement. And the two types of things that we talk about within stimulus control are the SD that signals availability and the S-delta that signals unavailability. Now this is a complicated concept to grasp, so be sure that you read through your text.

You might even want to watch this or review it a little bit to really try to hit home a few of the concepts. Okay, that's it. If you have any questions about stimulus control, let me know, and of course we'll be able to talk about it in our class sessions.

Transcript for:Understanding Stimulus Control in Behavior

Transcript for:
Understanding Stimulus Control in Behavior