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ESCAPE AND AVOIDANCE RESPONSE OF PRESCHOOL CHILDREN TO TWO SCHEDULES OF REINFORCEMENT WITHDRAWAL

1960; Wiley; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1901/jeab.1960.3-155

1938-3711

Donald M. Baer,

Parental Involvement in Education

Recent demonstrations by Sidman (1953) and Brady (1958) show that aversive control can establish an operant response which is regular in rate, efficient in the avoidance of the aversive stimulus which controls it, and durable over long periods of time during which the aversive stimulus is perfectly avoided.These characteristics alone make avoidance schedules a logical tool to apply to the development of social behaviors in humans.A primary prob- lem in any such attempt is the demonstration of avoidance responding under aversive control in the laboratory, especially with children as subjects.The present study represents a beginning at implementing avoidance techniques for children, and an exploration of pos- sibly significant variations in the way an aversive event may be programmed by a response.The aversive event used is the temporary withdrawal of positive reinforcement. SUBJECTS AND APPARATUSThe subjects were pre-school children, ranging in age from 4 to 6 years, in attendance at day-care schools during the course of the study.They represent low-income and student families.The study was conducted in a mobile laboratory built into a 19-foot house trailer (Bijou, 1958), which was parked close to the nursery school.The interior of the laboratory included a one-way observation room for the experimenter and a playroom for the child.The play- room contained a small chair, two tables holding toys or apparatus, a movie screen mounted on a wall, and a partitioned corner in which an accompanying adult (A) could sit, out of the child's sight but still present.The child was seated beside one table, facing the movie screen, with a bar to press located at his right hand such that he could respond to the bar while watching movies projected onto the screen.The bar was housed in a red box approximately I foot on a side.The movie screen was a 9-by 11-inch rectangle of translucent plastic, located in the wall separating child and experimenter.The movie projector, a Busch "Cinesalesman," operated from the experimenter's side.The projector contained as many as three cartoons on an "endless" reel of film, and could repeat these in an uninterrupted sequence for an indefinite number of cycles without rewinding or other adjustment.The cartoons were of the Castle Films' Woody Woodpecker series (Woody Plays Santa Claus, The Hollywood Matador, and The Dizzy Acrobats); each was in black and white, with sound, and lasted 7 minutes.PROCEDURE