all right welcome today we are going to cover discrimination and differentiation in aba these two terms are two of the most commonly requested terms i get when asked questions about the rbt or bcba exam the thing is they're very similar and at the same time different and if we remember a few key things these two terms become very easy to not only identify on the exam okay but to answer questions correctly on the exam so we're going to go over discrimination and differentiation we're going to go over a few practice questions to practice our ability to answer questions on these terms and then we're going to wrap it up so be sure to like and subscribe check out rbt exam review dot com or bcba study dot com leave a comment below email me for any questions work hard study hard let's get to it all right first things first maybe the most important thing to remember when we're dealing with discrimination and differentiation is that differential reinforcement leads to these two things so whether your discrimination training or your differentiation training you're using differential reinforcement meaning you're going to be reinforcing something and putting another thing on extinction if we're using stimulus discrimination we're going to be reinforcing responses in the presence of the identified or the desirable stimulus and putting and putting responses in the presence of the undesirable stimulus on extinction response differentiation very similar we're going to be reinforcing the responses we want to see and putting the responses we don't want to see on extinction it's as easy as that okay it's not any more complicated than reinforcing what you want and putting what you want on extinction so don't over complicate it second thing we often often often refer to it as discrimination and differentiation a good way to remember the difference is to go by the technical terms technically discrimination is actually called stimulus discrimination and differentiation is called response differentiation why is that important because the word is right in the term right if we're talking about discrimination we know we're talking about stimuli okay we're trying to tell the difference between stimuli if we're talking about differentiation we know we're talking about responses we want to be able to engage in different responses so that is the brief rundown of what differential reinforcement okay what role it plays in discrimination and differentiation so let's dive a little deeper okay into discrimination so discrimination also known as stimulus discrimination remember this is how we're going to remember it if we keep forgetting the technical term has the word in it discrimination is just stimulus discrimination discrimination involves discrimination training simply you have one behavior in the presence of two stimulus conditions so if we are for example identifying the color our stimulus conditions might be red card and blue card if i say point to red card what behavior am i going to reinforce well i'm obviously going to reinforce pointing to red card and not the blue card and that's very quickly going to start teaching my client or my student to discriminate between red and blue why because when i say red they receive reinforcement when touching red but not blue that's how behavior works example two picking the correct classroom so you are on a college campus maybe you're in a high school campus and you need to identify the correct room well you have room 201 and 202. you now have to identify or discriminate between 201 and 202. i might reinforce you for going into a 1 but not 202. now what's what is the what do you notice about this in this case we're dealing with a single response right example one we're just identifying a color example two we're picking the correct classroom it's the same response right but we're dealing with these multiple stimuli we're just trying to tell the difference between the stimuli and engage in the response in the presence of the correct stimulus one more note you're going to of course reinforce the behavior in the presence of the correct stimulus but not in the presence of the incorrect stimulus again it all comes down to differential reinforcement let's look at a quick question so a client steals food you want to teach her what food container she can eat out of and which container she cannot how would you do this so little note this comes straight from the cooper book a study they did on discrimination and teaching a i think it was a 14 year old girl to discriminate between containers and then what they did was they put labels okay on one container and on the other container to identify what she could and couldn't take so in this case you you want to teach her what food containers you can eat out of which container she cannot how would you do this so obviously we're going to try some sort of discrimination method right we're trying to discrimination train we want to teach stimulus discrimination so a reinforcer for opening the correct container but don't reinforce her if she can't open the correct container so what's what's the issue here the issue here is we are looking at specific responses opening versus can't open we're worried more about her choosing the right container right we can look at the responses later right now we just want her to pick the correct containers a focuses on one container which is the correct one rather than and looks at the responses rather than looking at the correct container versus the incorrect container so a we're not teaching discrimination of containers we're just teaching different responses b put a green dot on the correct container reinforces the client grabs the container with the green dot but not if she grabs the container without the dot okay good right same response we've got grabbing the container however we're only reinforcing if she grabs the correct stimulus which is the container with the green dot and not the container without the green dot understand the difference between a and b a we have the same stimulus but two different responses opening versus not open b we have the same response grabbing okay versus container with dot or container without a dot b is actually discriminating between those stimuli you need to start identifying these little key features in your questions that's going to be how you get better at the exam okay see if the client grabs the wrong container take away tv privileges for 30 minutes remember we're using differential reinforcement c is more of a punishment procedure now not saying every intervention is not going to have punishment right but in this case b is better because we are actually differentially reinforcing and then d when the client grabs the wrong container put it on extinction good that's only part of it though right we are indeed there is no instance of reinforcing the right container so we're not actually differentially reinforcing we're just using extinction which is part of differential reinforcement but we want to complete that intervention and b does that we have our container with the green dot container without the green dot if she grabs the container with the green dot reinforce if not extinction b is differential reinforcement that's how we teach stimulus discrimination okay let's get to differentiation again remember the key technical word response differentiation we are now focused on responses teaching different responses not so much the stimuli right so let's look at it differentiate differentiation training reinforced responses occur more frequently compared to unreinforced responses that should be obvious but that's what differentiation is we're going to take a response class responses that serve the same function and we're going to start reinforcing the response we want to see and not the one we don't and over time what's going to happen well the response that's being reinforced is going to occur more than the one that's not this leads to a new response class and is related to shaping differentiation is directly related to shaping because just because we don't have the full behavior doesn't mean we can't differentially or we can't differentially reinforce a response and shape up that response right so example one polite asking against straight from the cooper book saying please can i versus can i so on the book they say or they give the example of polite asking and a parent would only give in to the request if the kid used polite language so in this case we're reinforcing please can i and putting can i on extinction what's going to happen as we reinforce please can i that response is going to increase can i going to decrease differentiating between the responses eventually please can i becomes its own response class example two very common example gaining attention hitting versus tapping on the shoulder so if i want to teach my client to appropriately gain attention with a peer or a parent or whoever it might be what am i going to reinforce well i'm going to reinforce tapping on shoulder and put hitting on extinction eventually tapping on shoulder is going to increase when gaining attention hitting is going to decrease think about the difference between discrimination and differentiation differentiation we are focused all about the responses discrimination all about stimuli let's look at a question a treatment room door says push to open but your client always attempts to pull it open and requires a prompt to open the door how could you teach your client to push the door open so immediately why do we know this is differentiation well consider what we're targeting we're targeting different responses the client every time he has this door that he needs to push he's trying to pull it and we want him to push it we have this one door for this treatment room we want him to push it instead of pull it we need to differentiate between those responses and as we reinforce pushing pulling is going to go down so how are we going to teach them to do this hey reinforce your client for walking into their treatment room and not someone else's treatment room well in this case what is he doing he's got one response he's walking right but he's walking into the correct treatment room so he's actually discriminating between stimuli the truth the condition of his treatment room versus the condition of someone else's treatment room a is teaching discrimination we're looking for differentiation b deliver punishment when your client attempts to pull the door open again we're trying to use differential reinforcement not saying punishment won't be part of the procedure but is there a better way to do it than just delivering punishment every time they try to pull the door open see reinforce approximations of pushing the door until you reach the terminal behavior while putting pulling the door on extinction all right this looks pretty good right we're shaping up pushing the door so every time they engage in any approximation of pushing we're going to reinforce until we reach the actual behavior of pushing and then we're going to put pulling the door on extinction great use of differential reinforcement plus shaping entity put pulling the door on extinction again yes but c is better remember on our exams we want the best answer so b you can certainly use punishment if allowed d you can use extinction however c is the best we're using differential reinforcement plus shaping and we're completing those interventions all right let's wrap it up a little summary remember differential reinforcement leads to discrimination and differentiation you want to think responses or stimuli am i looking at stimulus discrimination telling the difference between two stimuli or are we trying to teach different responses reinforce response or and put another extinction response differentiation the quickest easiest way to remember this response differentiation is also associated with shaping for example red or blue would be what would be stimuli discriminating between red and blue point or grab those are responses we're going to differentiate between point or grab you can see how these are related right because i might you want you to point red at some point and grab red at some point or point to blue grab red so these can go hand in hand they kind of exist in the same world we're just looking at different targets okay thanks for watching please visit our websites for more like and subscribe four times a week we put out rbt exam questions and bcba questions be sure to check out all of those check out our study materials rbt exam review dot com or bcba study dot com depending on what you're getting ready for as always questions comments i'd love to help work hard study hard see you soon