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Biomedical subjects

J E Spradlin

Publications and source records attributed to J E Spradlin.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1991

Assessment of stimuli controlling the requests of students with severe mental retardation during a snack routine.

This study assessed stimuli controlling requests during a snack routine after extensive request training with a delayed prompt procedure. During training sessions, one of three three-item snack groups was presented to 3 subjects with severe mental retardation. Assessment sessions involved (a) training conditions (all items were visible), (b) presenting two of three items from a particular group, or (c) presenting no items. One subject requested food items when no food items were present, 2 frequently requested a missing item when the two other items were visible, and all subjects requested visible items. Procedures for assessing stimulus control, such as those described in the current paper, should lead to a better understanding of the variables controlling behaviors that initially appear perplexing and unpredictable.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1990

Conditional discrimination in mentally retarded adults: the development of generalized skills.

The development of generalized conditional discrimination skills was examined in adults with retardation. Two subjects with histories of failure to acquire arbitrary matching under trial-and-error procedures were successful under procedures that trained one or more prerequisite skills. The successive discrimination between the sample stimuli was established by training the subjects to name the stimuli. The simultaneous discrimination between the comparison stimuli was established using either (a) standard simple discrimination training with reversals or (b) a procedure in which each of the two sample-comparison relations in the conditional discrimination was presented in blocks of trials, with the size of the blocks decreasing gradually until sample presentation was randomized. The amount of prerequisite training required varied across subjects and across successive conditional discriminations. After acquiring either two or three conditional discriminations with component training, both subjects learned new conditional discriminations under trial-and-error procedures. In general, each successive conditional discrimination was acquired more rapidly. Tests showed that conditional responding had become a generalized skill. Symmetry was shown for almost all trained relations. Symmetry trial samples were ultimately named the same as the stimuli to which they were related in training.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Long-term stability of equivalence relations in the absence of training or practice.

An adult male with mild mental retardation, whose laboratory history included training in a match-to-sample task on 16 arbitrary relations among 16 visual stimuli and 2 auditory stimuli, had performances that showed the development of 112 additional arbitrary relations that had never been reinforced. In the presented study on 2-year and 3-year follow-up tests for these derived relations, his performances remained stable despite the absence of opportunities to practice these relations between the tests and the absence of explicit feedback during the tests. The similarity to the long-term stability of language was discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1979

Time delay: a technique to increase language use and facilitate generalization in retarded children.

Institutional breakfast-serving procedures were manipulated to assess what effect changes in that aspect of the environment would have on requests for food. During baseline, six severely retarded children were required to pick up their food trays and return to their seats. The first manipulation, delaying the giving of the food tray for 15 seconds, served as a cue to evoke meal requests by three of the six children. Two of the remaining three required a model of an appropriate meal request (i.e., "Tray, please.") at the end of the 15-second delay before they began requesting their meals. To evoke meal requests from the sixth child, an intensive training procedure, consisting of massed trials of delay and modeling, was required. Three different probes were administered to assess generalization across the people serving the meals, across mealtimes, and across both people and mealtimes. Typically, generalized responding in these new situations could be prompted by use of the 15-second delay procedure. Functional aspects of the delay procedure and its potential usefulness for evoking speech and facilitating generalization are discussed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1979

Teaching number-word equivalences: a study of transfer.

The study was designed to determine whether retarded adolescents and nonretarded preschool children would generalize to other tasks involving printed number names if they were taught the number names in an auditory-receptive task. Four nonretarded preschool children and three retarded children participated. All children could count and use spoken and printed numerals. None of the children could adequately perform any task involving printed number words. After receiving training on an auditory-receptive task involving printed number words, all children improved their performance on tasks involving matching printed number words and numerals and printed number words and sets and improved in their ability to name printed number words.

Achievement↗
PubMed1976

Establishing conditional discriminations without direct training: stimulus classes and labels.

An attempt was made to expand the paradigm published by Spradlin, Cotter, and Baxley (1973). Spradlin et al. conditioned subjects to select a choice stimulus in response to two different sample stimuli and then conditioned them to select a new choice stimulus in response to one sample stimulus. The remaining sample stimulus then controlled the second choice stimulus. In the current investigation, two subjects were taught two classes of four symbols each through visual match-to-sample training. When auditory symbols were conditioned to control some members of these two classes, the reamining members came under auditory control without direct training.

Adolescent↗