Japanese Journal of Behavior Analysis

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This study investigated the effect of behavioral coaching on improving throwing skills in baseball. Four senior high school students in the baseball club participated in this research. Behavior change was evaluated through a multiple baseline design. The throwing skill was divided into ten sub-skills. Instructing, praising, shaping, modeling, and role-playing were used to establish such skills. The results of Experiment I showed that behavioral coaching improved the throwing performance. As regards to hitting the target zone in the throwing skill, however, there was no improvement. Experiment II was conducted to improve such hitting the target skill. The result suggests that training with additional sub-skills, such as eye fixation to the target zone, did improve the skill. These results were discussed in terms of the effect of behavioral coaching on improving performance and behavior product, such as hitting the target skill.

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Five autisitic children were trained to report "private events" in various play situations. Conditional discrimination training was conducted to establish two verbal behavior : "pleasant" and "exciting." "When children played with pleasant materials, such as big ball, they were required to report the listener "pleasant." When children played with exciting materials, such as balloon, they were required to report the listener "exciting." A11 children acquired such tacts for "private events." These tacts were emitted for non-training materials and for another persons including their mothers. These results suggest that acquisition of tact was not based on children's "mental state, " but on the conditional response to external play materials.

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One chimpanzee, who had a long training history of conditional discrimanation tasks, was trained on a new conditional-discrimination procedure in which a visual stimulus (conditional differential outcome) corresponding to each stimulus class followed the responses to the comparison stimulus. She was also trained on identity matching with new "Kanji" stimuli with conditional differential outcome. After the baseline training, she was tested in trained sample-Kanji comparison or Kanji sample-trained comparison trials. The subject reliably selected the corresponding comparison stimuli on particular probe trials. This result might suggest that the differentiation of outcomes among stimulus classes had some effect on the establishment of stimulus class membership.

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