Study Objective: The present study examined whether transfer of ordinal functions could be influenced by temporal order of stimulus substitution. Participants: Students (N=42) were randomly assigned to either a forward or a backward substitution group. Procedure: Participants were trained on the original 5-item sequence (A1-A2-A3-A4-A5). In substitution training, they were trained on 5 kinds of substitution sequences: 1 of the 5 items in the original sequence was replaced by the item in the same position in a novel 5-item sequence (B1-B2-B3-B4-B5). In the forward substitution group, the training began with B1, and thereafter progressed from B2 to B5. In the backward substitution group, the training was conducted in the opposite order. In the test phase, generation of novel 5-item sequence and 6 kinds of 2-item sequences was tested. Measure: The percentage of sequences produced that were correct. Results: Participants in both groups mostly produced correct sequences, and no significant difference in the accuracy scores was found between the 2 groups. Conclusion: Transfer of ordinal function was influenced more by forward or backward stimulus substitution than by random stimulus substitution.

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Study Objective: The present study examined effects of video feedback using unedited video files in order to improve parenting performance when training children with autism spectrum disorder in prewriting skills. Design: ABC design with follow-up. Setting: Observation room in a university. Participants: One mother and her twin boys with autism. Intervention: The parenting performance skills were divided into the following 5 components: grip point modification, environmental coordination, prompting, reinforcement, and token economy. The mother was given basic instructions on how to record the training sessions on video (A). Intervention 1 (B) consisted of her receiving feedback from a therapist while she watched the video of the sessions. In intervention 2 (C), the mother was given a token-board to use for reinforcing the children's target behaviors. Measures: The percentage of appropriate parenting components by the mother in each session, the percentage of failures by her children when tracing frames on lines, and the results of a social validation questionnaire completed by the mother. Results: After the interventions, the percentage of the mother's appropriate components increased, and the children's percentage of failures decreased. Conclusion: The mother's performance in teaching prewriting skills to her children with autism spectrum disorder improved after video feedback and token reinforcement were used.

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Study objective: The present study aimed to examine effectiveness of evaluative feedback for maintaining a participant's self-monitoring with no others' aid and for returning him to his normal weight and girth after face-to-face health counseling specifically about metabolic syndrome. Design: A single-subject self-experiment with an ABACAD design was continued for 177 weeks. Setting: Self-monitoring was done at the participant's home. Participant: Male in his 50s, the author of this article. Independent variables: Face-to-face counseling and evaluative feedback presented on the participant's computer display. Measure: Weight, girth, and 5 behavioral goals: walking, bicycling, abstaining from alcohol, eating vegetables, and eating a moderate evening meal. Results: The gradual decrease in weight and girth observed in the first phase of the research disappeared in the second phase, but it apparently returned in the final phase when evaluative feedback was added contingent on the participant recording data. Conclusion: Recording contingent evaluative feedback may be effective in maintaining self-monitoring of weight and girth, and may eventually help individuals recover from metabolic syndrome without the support of other people.

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The present special issue of tutorial articles is based on the second and fourth meetings of the Kyoto Seminar for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, titled "Instrumentation in the Study of Operant Conditioning: The Past and the Future". The Kyoto Seminars were held twice a year from 2012 to 2015, that is, six times. The present tutorial articles deal with operant chambers as an experimental space and a variety of methods for producing intermittence of reinforcement in the study of operant behavior. These articles reveal that research in operant behavior has benefited from technical innovations in experimental apparatus, such as operant chambers, as well as from new methods for arranging intermittent schedules of reinforcement, such as variable-interval (VI) and variable-ratio (VR) schedules. These articles will provide a further step for future research in operant behavior.

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