Study objective: To examine effects of an educational program for training students in transfer assistance techniques, which are techniques used to transfer a patient between a bed and a wheelchair using a sliding board. Design: Intervention group-control group comparison, and an ABCA design for the intervention group. Setting: A training room at a college. Participants: Occupational therapy students (N=36). Intervention: The intervention group was given the educational program in a baseline phase, intervention 1, intervention 2, and follow-up phase design, whereas the control group had only the baseline phase. Baseline: Screening of video 1, which showed the correct transfer assistance techniques. Intervention 1: Feedback on participants’ performance of the techniques, and verbal praise when more techniques were performed. Intervention 2: Screening of video 2, which had detailed information on the complex procedures. Follow-up: Same as baseline. Measure: The participants’ performance of each of the transfer assistance techniques from bed to wheelchair and from wheelchair to bed. Results: The results showed that the participants in the intervention group performed more of the transfer assistance techniques than those in the control group did. Conclusion: The present results suggest that this educational program using feedback on performance, verbal praise, and detailed video materials may have been effective in increasing the number of transfer assistance techniques performed.

Study objective: To examine if English matching-to-sample tact training produces derived English to Japanese and English to English intraverbal responding. Design: A comparison of pre- and post-test scores within participants. Setting: Participants engaged in an online experiment from their homes. Participants: Preliminary assessment: 5 native English speakers and 7 native Japanese speakers; experiment: 21 native Japanese speakers. Independent variable: 3 classes of facial expressions: calm, delightful, and furious. For each class, 5 photos and a pair of English synonyms were selected. Intervention: In the matching-to-sample training trial, a face photo was presented as a sample stimulus, and 3 English words were presented as comparison stimuli. A correct response was indicated by ○, and an incorrect response was indicated by ×. The correct English word was presented regardless of the previous outcome. Measures: The number of correct responses in the pre- and post-tests, and the percentage of correct responses in the matching-to-sample training. Results: The English tact matching-to-sample training produced English to Japanese and English to English intraverbal responding in most of the 21 participants. Conclusion: The previous research finding was systematically replicated in Japanese native speakers learning abstract words in English.

Study objective: To teach a 6th grade boy to produce increased behavioral variability while reducing "rock-paper-scissors echolalia," that is, the child changing his move to match the opponent’s move when playing rock-paper-scissors. Design: Pre-check, baseline, intervention, and follow-up. Setting: Individual sessions, face-to-face across a desk in the special needs classroom. Participants: A 6th-grade boy with severe intellectual disability and a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. Independent variables: 6 intervention procedures, including reinforcement with Lag 1, verbal prompts such as "scissors", and prompts to reduce rock-paper-scissors echolalia, such as having the instructor hold the boy’s hand to prevent him from changing his move. Measure: The percentage of trials in which the boy made a move that was different from the move he had made on the 2 preceding trials. Results: The boy was able to play rock-paper-scissors with some variability, that is, without repeatedly making the same move and without cyclic responses. In addition, rock-paper-scissors echolalia no longer occurred. Conclusion: The boy’s ability to play rock-paper-scissors was successfully improved. However, it might be challenging to use the present procedures in some educational settings due to the procedure being difficult to implement.

Study Objective: To examine effects of a Tier 1 intervention with school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS) on the occurrence of students’ problem behaviors in a public middle school in Japan during a 4-year period. Design: AB₁B₂B₃. Setting: 1 public middle school. Participants: All students and faculty members at the school. Intervention: After grade-wide positive behavior support (PBS) was implemented to increase teachers’ verbal praise for students’ appropriate behaviors, the same intervention was expanded to the school level. Subsequently, based on the scores on the Japanese version of the Tiered Fidelity Inventory (TFI), action plans to implement school-wide positive behavior support were developed for each semester. Teachers followed these action plans in order to implement school-wide positive behavior support . Additionally, the school coordinated with elementary schools and families in order to implement positive behavior support in the community. Measure: The number of problem behaviors per school day per 100 students. Results: After the intervention, the scores on the Tiered Fidelity Inventory improved, and a significant decrease was observed in problem behaviors school-wide. The scores on the student and parent questionnaires also improved. Conclusion: After a Tier 1 intervention of school-wide positive behavior support was implemented with high fidelity in a Japanese public middle school, students’ problem behaviors decreased school-wide. Ways to implement Tiers 2 and 3 interventions in Japanese schools should be developed.

The experimental analysis of behavior, a basic field of behavior analysis, experimentally manipulates the 3-term contingency in order to analyze the functional relationship between environmental factors and behavior, and measure behavior. The primal requirement of the experimental analysis of behavior is to simulate the 3-term contingency in a controlled laboratory setting; its research tool is an operant experimental chamber (commonly known as "Skinner box"), consisting of discriminanda, an operandum, and a reinforcer-presenting apparatus, corresponding to the 3-term contingency. Control of the Skinner box has evolved from detection and automatic reinforcement of responses by mechanical mechanisms, to electronics, and thence to computer control. It has also continued to evolve to allow the study of various response topographies, while introducing new technologies that allow for automatic measurement and detection. Experiments that previously required expensive systems can now be performed using inexpensive systems as technology evolves, and animal behavior can be detected in greater detail than was possible previously. In addition, technological advances have widened the range of propositions that can be examined. These innovations are further advancing the behavioral science begun with Skinner’s first experimental box. The present paper describes the evolution of the Skinner box by presenting the history of automation of its control, the connection between the devices developed in Skinner’s "Project Pigeon" and "Project ORCON" and the development of postwar devices, and examples of the introduction of real-time image processing and real-time vocal recognition technologies. Finally, advances in device production technology using 3D printers are presented.

Textbooks on behavior analysis and the psychology of learning conventionally refer to experiments on vertebrate animals such as humans, monkeys, dogs, cats, rats, and pigeons when explaining the basics of respondent and operant conditioning. However, conditioning occurs not only in vertebrates but also in invertebrates. In arthropods, annelids, mollusks, and flatworms, conditioning is easily confirmed. Even in echinoderms, conditioning seems to be possible, at least in starfish. No reports of unicellular organisms, sponges, or cnidarians reliably demonstrate conditioning. There is a theory that the ability to learn through conditioning arose during the Cambrian Period, the beginning of the Paleozoic Era, and that this was one of the triggers of the Cambrian Explosion. But, animals that inhabited the Precambrian Ediacaran period may also have been capable of learning through conditioning. The conditioning ability found in various animal species may have been acquired independently during the evolutionary process, but I suggest that it was inherited from a common ancestor species until today. In this case, the conditioning ability has been inherited for about 600 million years (555 million years to be exact).

The present tutorial describes problems that occurred during experiments in the author’s laboratory that used human participants and how the problems were solved. The problems included the following: (a) the participants’ response rate was not different between fixed-ratio (FR) and differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate (DRL) schedules, (b) the participants did not select the correct comparison during matching-to-sample training, (c) a conditional discrimination was not established when FR and DRL schedules were in effect during training, and (d) the operant level of the response was too high or was zero. These problems were solved by (a) determining the length of components by the number of reinforcers and inserting inter-component intervals, (b) introducing forced trials, (c) attaching limited-hold contingencies to the schedules and changing the procedure such that the schedule could change every trial, and (d) selecting as the target response a two-response sequence that had a low but above zero rate during a nonreinforcement baseline session.