 All right everyone, welcome back. It's Veronica Howard. So in this third unit we're talking all about antecedent control and the way in which the context or the stimuli that occur before behavior influence the response that our learners emit. Previously we've talked a little bit about stimulus control. How does behavior become more likely in the presence of certain environmental circumstances? And so when we're talking about teaching and evoking or setting the occasion for responses, it's great when we have behavior that's occurring frequently, when we have behavior that's happening a lot. Sometimes that doesn't happen. Sometimes the behavior doesn't occur naturally in the presence of a desired antecedent stimulus. So what we have to do is kind of set the occasion or create an artificial way of getting the behavior to happen so we can capture it. That's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to be talking about prompting and the prompt hierarchies in this first section. But first let's begin with a little review. Remember that we were talking about where and when behavior happens. So we know that a discriminative stimulus is a stimulus that precedes a behavior and it's present only when reinforcement will occur for that response. So it's kind of like the stimulus that tells you where and when and under what circumstances to emit the behavior so you can earn the reinforcer. We can do a formal procedure called discrimination training where we make the behavior happen in a narrower range of environmental circumstances where we narrow down how often or under what circumstances a person emits that response. And we do that by reinforcing the behavior when it happens under certain circumstances or in one stimulus context and we extinguish the behavior in all of the responses. But again in this discrimination training paradigm you have to have the behavior occurring at least a little bit so you can capture it with reinforcement. We also refer to that behavior as being under stimulus control in stimulus controls that increased probability of the behavior happening in the presence of the discriminative stimulus. If you have behavior that doesn't occur it can't come under stimulus control and if we're trying to increase the probability of behavior happening we have to move to something called prompting. So prompting is an additional antecedent stimulus it's something that we add to the environment before behavior occurs to increase the probability that the person is going to make a correct response or they're going to emit the behavior that will contact reinforcement. And we're trying to the aim of prompting is to increase the probability of a response under certain circumstances so that eventually we can fade out or remove that prompt and have a natural SD takeover and maintain that response. When we're talking about using prompting we do this because the behavior doesn't happen under stimulus control it's not happening naturally and we need it to happen. So for instance imagine that I'm working with a client in this case maybe my client is my dog and I say that my dog knows how to sit which means that I've seen evidence that the behavior is in my dog's repertoire but the dog doesn't emit the behavior when I'm giving them the instruction to sit. So we see that we have that response sit but it's not occurring when it should be. The antecedent stimulus is sit that's the antecedent that we want to control the behavior that's the target discriminant stimulus and we want to bring behavior under control of that response. I give the instruction and dog doesn't respond. So what I can do is I can add in a particular hand gesture that's known to work really well. So in my time working with dogs on a shelter if you hold a treat in your hand and you just move that hand backwards above a dog's head what will happen is their little head will follow the treat and they'll just sort of naturally sit. This works for about 80% of dogs. So my natural discriminative stimulus the stimulus that I want to control the behavior has the instruction sit but what I'm going to do at least for a little bit is I'm going to add in a kind of gestural prompt I'm going to use my hand and just kind of you know trick the dog into sitting and then eventually when they start to get it I can remove that prompt. When we're talking about using prompting effectively do bear in mind that I might start here by giving that instruction and then use the treat to kind of lure the dog into the position. This is a gestural or a positional prompt when that dog is in the sitting position I absolutely have to give the reinforcer. So it's not that we can just prompt and prompt and prompt and the behavior will happen and we just we're thankful for it you must give the reinforcer and then we're going to continue doing these trials with the prompt until the dog gets pretty fluent so I'm going to give the instruction sit and then I'm going to do the hand and then we're going to if they sit give the reinforcer then I'm going to give the instruction sit and we're going to do the hand then if they said give them the reinforcer and you'll start to notice they get quicker the faster over time almost like the behavior is starting to come under control of at least one of those stimuli but I have to be careful because if I'm not being mindful of how I'm using that prompt they could become a little bit dependent on it so I have to really be careful when I'm using prompting because prompts have to be removed and we have to remove them again because of something called prompt dependence and this is when the client only emits the desired target behavior when whoever is doing the teaching is using that prompt now prompt dependence you can combat this a few different ways first of all make sure you're using prompts only when you absolutely need to so if the behavior can occur naturally and you never needed to use a prompt don't do it to begin with second you can make sure that you're only using those prompts for as long as necessary to foster a generalization like to get the behavior to happen in the presence of more stimuli or to foster discrimination to make sure the behavior only happens under certain circumstances and you want to make sure that you're planning on how you're going to decrease and withdrawal those prompts effectively when we talk about prompts there can be lots of different kinds of prompts we can have a physical prompt which is where I'm actually physically touching the learner and kind of moving them into position positional prompts could be myself putting myself in relation to the the learner in some way we can do verbal prompts like giving instructions or just small hints we can do gestural prompts like maybe pointing at things or if I'm talking to someone online and I can't hear them I might go like this to kind of indicate that I can't communicate I can't hear that information we also do visual prompts so sometimes we can do things like add a little sign or change the color of something lots of different prompt categories that you could use but typically when we're talking about using these in teaching folks will describe what are called prompt hierarchies which is just another way of describing how we're going to go about using these are we going to go in what's called a most to least prompting hierarchy in a most to least prompting hierarchy what we do is we start with the most intrusive level of prompting and that would be a full physical and then we might fade back a little bit into a partial physical into a modeling into a gestural so on and so forth where are we going to start with least to most intrusive prompting right so in this particular case what we're talking about here is do we want to and I'm going to go back do we want to go most to least so do we want to start as intrusive as possible then fade out as the learner gains independence or do we want to go least to most where we only layer on additional support as the person needs it there are some reasons why you might choose one over the other let's go back to most of least you might choose most of these prompting because you don't want the learner to make any mistakes if it's a really high pressure situation if someone could be harmed if making mistakes will be detrimental for the learner or someone that they serve in some way definitely use most of least it's been suggested that folks who are really averse to experiencing extinction might benefit from most of least folks who experience intellectual or developmental disability could benefit from most of these prompting in a most of these prompting paradigm you have the highest probability that the learner is going to admit the correct response but there are some drawbacks here in most of these prompting you always have to be very very careful that you're removing or you're moving down the prompt hierarchy levels as quickly as you possibly can because most of these prompting can quickly foster prompt dependence this can be a situation where the learner kind of stops trying on their own and they'll rely on others to help them it can also be pretty difficult because depending on the learner that you serve remember that these are very physically intrusive levels of prompting and again depending on your learner if you were to start with a full fiscal and you don't know a lot about the client that you serve it could be dangerous for the person who's using that level of prompting so always respect the autonomy of your client only touch a client if you have their permission if you've actually asked them and you're making sure that it's okay and it's not disrespectful for them in some way and again you're trying to remove these as quickly as possible so that you're getting to independence so try to probe down to uh lower levels of prompting as much as possible with least the most prompting there are some benefits here first this is less likely to result in prompt dependence because you're only layering on more intrusive levels of prompting as you need them uh this level of of prompting can also kind of respect the autonomy of your client because you're following their lead but there are some drawbacks here as well this level or this hierarchy of prompting uh is most likely to be one where the learner is going to contact some extinction because you have to go through multiple levels of prompting before you get down to the level where the learner will actually emit the response so this can also take a little bit longer this can take more trials and more time to help support someone and so you just have to figure out what's going to work best for your client one uh word of advice that I would provide is remember the analysis part of behavior analysis so look closely at the client that you're serving uh no take the information that you know about your client and use it to guide what you're going to do if you know that you work with a client who benefits really well from gestural prompting and you often have to go down to that level uh start there right started gestural go into modeling and so on and so forth but know the information about your client watch very very closely for times when maybe they're demonstrating a little independence so you can be fading back and removing that uh that prompting hierarchy and going back to independence as quickly as possible and always be having a plan for how you're going to be removing prompts so that you're battling prompt dependence so just to quickly summarize this section remember prompts are those additional antecedent stimuli that we add to increase the probability of a response when it isn't occurring naturally in the presence of a discriminative stimulus the overuse of prompts can cause prompt dependence so only use prompts as much as necessary and remove them as quickly as you can you don't want to be in a situation where the learner is dependent on the prompt because one uh they're not independent right and independent and full living is something that we're aiming for for all of our clients and two you you can kind of get a little bit resentful of the client if they're always relying on that prompt i'm thinking of some folks that i've served like teenage boys who will only do the chore when you tell them to do the chore we really want that independence so we try to fade that out as much as possible and capture those naturally occurring discriminative stimuli in the environment and then remember we do have these prompting hierarchies they give us a kind of quick reference for the level of intrusiveness and where you start there are benefits for most at least and least to most and you want to use the one that's going to be best for your client if you're trying to maximize independence you may want to go from a least to most if you're trying to reduce the overall number of errors that folks make you want to use most at least thanks so much for joining me i'll see you next time