Motivational Refinements for Facilitating Reinforcement Schedule Thinning

Summary

Destructive behavior represents a comorbid condition of developmental disability for which risk increases with intellectual disability severity, communication deficits, and co-occurring autism spectrum disorder. Destructive behavior, such as self-injurious behavior and aggression, causes harm to the child and others and increases the risk for institutionalization, social isolation, physical restraint, medication overuse, and abuse. Clinicians have used functional analyses to identify the variables that reinforce destructive behavior and to develop effective, function-based treatments. Functional communication training (FCT) is an empirically supported, function-based treatment that decreases destructive behavior. Using FCT, the clinician teaches the child to use a functional communication response (FCR) to request the reinforcer maintaining destructive behavior, while placing destructive behavior on extinction. For example, if functional analysis results showed that attention reinforced destructive behavior, the clinician would provide attention when the child used the FCR ("Play with me, please") and would not provide attention for destructive behavior. Two limitations of FCT are that (a) schedules of reinforcement maintaining the FCR must often be thinned gradually to levels that are practical for caregivers to implement consistently in the home and in the community, and (b) this necessary process of reinforcement schedule thinning regularly causes destructive behavior to increase following initially effective treatment, a form of treatment relapse called resurgence. The current project aims to improve these limitations of FCT by (a) hastening the process of reinforcement schedule thinning by removing unnecessary schedule-thinning steps using the results of a progressive interval assessment and (b) mitigating the resurgence of destructive behavior by providing stimuli that highly compete with the reinforcer maintaining destructive behavior. The investigators will conduct a randomized clinical trial to evaluate the extent to which these two promising refinements to FCT improve the process of reinforcement schedule thinning, and an exploratory experiment will examine the interactive effects of these two approaches. This novel project has the potential to substantially improve standards of care guiding the treatment of severe destructive behavior and to improve the long-term outcomes for children and families afflicted by these debilitating behavior disorders.

Conditions

• Decreasing Destructive Behavior
• Increasing Functional Communicative Behavior

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Traditional Schedule Thinning

During traditional schedule thinning during functional communication training with discriminative stimuli (e.g., multiple schedules, chained schedules), practitioners correlate a unique stimulus with reinforcement (e.g., a green card) and another for extinction (e.g., a red card). When the reinforcement and extinction stimuli are presented, the child's communication responses are honored or not honored, respectively. Behavior analysts begin with a brief period of extinction (e.g., 2 s) and gradually increase that duration as the child displays low levels of destructive behavior and high levels of discriminated communication responses (i.e., communication requests during reinforcement components only) until the child reaches a terminal schedule informed by caregiver/child preference (e.g., 2.5-min reinforcement, 10-min extinction). Typically, the starting extinction period is brief and arbitrarily selected and there are no competing stimuli programmed.

BEHAVIORAL

PIA-Informed Schedule Thinning

This intervention involves the same general components as Traditional Schedule Thinning. However, rather than starting with an arbitrary duration of the extinction component (e.g., 2 s), the behavior analyst empirically derives the starting point based on a progressive-interval assessment (PIA). The PIA involves rapidly increasing the duration of the extinction component within a single session to determine the leanest schedule of reinforcement that does not produce untoward effects. Behavior analysts will progress through the following extinction durations within a single session: 3 s, 11 s , 21 s, 34 s, 50 s, 70 s, 95 s, 126 s, 164 s, 213 s, and 270 s. For example, if the participant displays destructive behavior at 164 s consistently, but not at 126 s, the experimenters will start schedule thinning with a 126-s extinction component. There will be no competing stimuli programmed in this intervention.

BEHAVIORAL

PIA-Informed Schedule Thinning with Competing Stimuli

This intervention is identical to PIA-Informed Schedule Thinning except that behavior analysts will program competing activities (e.g., alternative activities like toys or therapist attention) during extinction components. The competing stimuli will be derived from a competing stimulus assessment in which destructive behavior is analyzed across various conditions in which only the activity is manipulated during the extinction period (e.g., a session with action figures during extinction, a session with tablet during extinction). The items that produce the highest levels of child engagement and lowest levels of destructive behavior are known as highly competing items.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Brian D Greer, Ph.D. · Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

3 Years

Max Age

17 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2023-10-24

Primary Completion

2028-05-31

Completion

2028-08-31

Countries

• United States

Study Locations