 Hey everyone, welcome back. It's Veronica Howard. So we're going to continue talking about different training methods. This time we're going to talk about imitation training. This is another one that I think people are pretty used to, so I'm going to move through it quickly, but as a super, super mini review, remember that when we talked last time we were talking about instructional training. Instructional training is where the teacher provides a verbal description of the target behavior, and then if the learner emits that descriptive response, that instructed behavior, they earn the reinforcer. So really the SD that has power here in this training paradigm is a verbal description. When we're talking about imitation training, this is a method of teaching that involves a demonstration of the target skill. The demonstration is what's called an imitative stimulus. So the demonstration of the skill, and then if the learner emits that same response, if they do the skill that they were just shown, then they earn the reinforcer. And we have all of these really lovely examples of imitation happening. In fact, it's sort of a hardwired response. We see that imitation is as possible, even for very young learners. So in some foundational developmental research, researchers were providing this imitative stimulus of different facial expressions, and then they would see if young infants would replicate those responses, and they found that imitation did occur. The imitative behavior is more likely to occur in the presence of the imitative stimulus, and this shows that the imitative behavior is under stimulus control of that imitative stimulus. So the behavior is more likely to occur in the presence of the stimulus than its absence. This is stimulus control. Again, we also see this across animals in the animal kingdom. So when we have these tiny adorable monkeys who are presenting with the facial expression, you see the researcher opening their mouth there, we see that the monkey will imitate. We do this as well for other responses, such as sticking out the tongue. So we see the researcher on the left sticking out their tongue, and we see that animals in the animal kingdom can imitate our response. Remember, this is again its behavior under stimulus control. It's the antecedent stimulus that is setting the occasion for controlling that behavior. And I mentioned a moment ago that we kind of have this innate trait for imitation. We're hardwired for imitation. We have something called mirror neurons, and you see activity in mirror neurons when people watch the behavior of others. This is what makes vicarious reinforcement and punishment possible. There's also some suggestion that this is responsible for empathy, what I'm showing you are two functional MRIs in a brain skin. And you see the activity that darker red spots indicate what a person would experience if they had pain themselves. Pain would register across the top of the brain and the temporal lobes and a little bit here in the parietal junction. But when we watch other people, the same person watching another person in pain, registers activity in the same areas of the brain that they had activity when they were experiencing pain. So there's some suggestion that mirror neurons not only set the occasion for us to potentially imitate others, but may also be the foundation of our empathic responses. When we talk about imitation training, it can be really easy to assume that imitation is innate so we can take it for granted, but be careful. Imitation is innate for many learners and teachers, and it's widely widely used because it's very effective. Many parents are using imitation training without even realizing it. A few examples might be, for instance, when we show our kids how to do something or when our kids kind of naturally mimic us. We see some examples of the same kind of paradigm with male children and parents. We can see it with older siblings. You might even see it across animals in different parts of the animal kingdom. You don't even have to be a conspecific. You can imitate the behavior of animals. But even though there's a potential, there's a tendency to imitate, it's not guaranteed. So you can present an imitative stimulus, but it's not a guarantee that the learner is going to admit that imitative behavior. This can happen for a variety of reasons. Could be traumatic brain injury. Could simply be that the learner has not been adequately reinforced for emitting the target response. Under these circumstances, we would treat a lack of imitation like we would treat any other lack of response in the presence of a discriminative stimulus. If it doesn't occur, then we prompt. We add an additional imitative stimulus or we add an additional prompt, a verbal, a gestural model, whatever it is. And then once we start getting that behavior to occur, we fade the stimulus out so we don't get prompt dependence. In imitation training, remember that the teacher models the desired behavior, the imitative stimulus and reinforces it when it occurs. If it doesn't occur, prompting and fading are really helpful. But there are some prerequisite skills that you have to check to see if they occur before you try to use imitation training. The most important prerequisite skill to determine if a person will benefit from imitation training is really the ability, the capacity to pay attention. So what do I mean by pay attention? In order to use imitation training effectively, there's some guidelines. We recommend that a person can stay seated or at least they can look at us long enough to potentially see the imitative stimulus to see the model. A person has to have the ability to kind of be calm for a moment to take that in and they have to have the ability to direct their looking behavior to different objects. If your learner is not doing a lot of these prerequisites, don't try to use imitation training. They're not going to see your imitative stimulus and thus it's not going to be effective. All right, so if they lack those prerequisite skills, you have to go back and target some of those skills and then work your way forward slowly. Just to quickly summarize, we've talked about imitation training. Imitation training involves modeling a behavior and then reinforcing that behavior when it occurs. That model is referred to as an imitative stimulus and the behavior that's admitted as an imitative response or behavior. While we're biologically or genetically predisposed to imitate, this is not a guarantee because we will stop imitating if we're not reinforced. So teachers are really going to have to maximize their effectiveness to make sure that they're programming or planning reinforcement for imitation. We want this to be a behavior that stays in folks repertoire. So try to keep it around whenever possible. I'll see you guys next time.