 Hey everyone, welcome back. It's Veronica Howard. So we are moving now into the unit where we're going to be talking about some additional advanced stimulus control strategies. These are going to be strategies again where we're utilizing a lot of antecedent stimuli and we're trying to bring behavior under control of some stimulus that occurs before behavior. We're also going to be promoting behavior change, still using consequences because remember if behavior doesn't pay off we won't do it. Let's begin with instructional training. This one is actually pretty straightforward, pretty self-satisfying. This one is not difficult for lots of people to understand because this is a type of training that we're pretty used to experiencing. When we're talking about instructional training, we're talking about a method of teaching that involves giving a verbal description of the target response and then delivering the reinforcer if the learner emits the instructed behavior. So in this particular case what we're talking about here is I'm going to describe the skill. If the learner performs the skill, I'm going to deliver the reinforcer. And since what we're talking about here is behavior that's essentially coming under control of a verbal stimulus, like a description of the performance, this is an excellent time to come back to and talk about that term that I've been using a lot, which is rule-governed behavior or behavior that comes under control of our verbal repertoire. So rule-governed behavior, we follow rules all the time. Why do we follow rules? Why is it that describing a behavior can evoke or set the occasion for a response which will engage in and likely contact reinforcement? Well, we have this category rule-governed behavior. It's behavior controlled by a verbal description of a contingency rather than the actual contingency. So two functional classes of rule-governed behavior exist. We have either clients or tracking, and I'm going to break these down for you. Clients is this way that we learn to follow rules because the person who gave us that rule, the person who describes that contingency for us, is also going to be the one who delivers the consequence for that behavior. So clients, you can remember this as being kind of short for compliance or being compliant with the instruction that the person gives you. If you follow the rule, you earn the reinforcer. If you don't follow the rule, either you don't learn earn the reinforcer or maybe something bad will happen. An example of this could be for instance that I'm going to follow the verbal instruction here, verbal speed limit 55. It's written down, but technically that's a verbal or that's a permanent product of someone else's verbal behavior. I'm going to follow the instruction to drive 55 or less because if I don't, I'll get a ticket. So this verbal behavior, drive 55 or less, comes to control my behavior. It acts on my behavior. It predicts the consequences that are available. A perfect example of this is one that we've talked about before, the Milgram experiment. Remember, in this experiment, the researcher brought in a subject. They said, you're going to do a teaching paradigm. You're going to tell this other person when they get words wrong, and if they get something wrong, if they don't make that association correctly, you're going to give them a little shock. The participant was taught how to use the electric shock machine, an actor in another room pretended to be the learner, got a lot of things wrong, so much so that they would get more and more and more dangerous levels of electric shock, and then finally, they would pretend to have a heart attack and fall over. The whole point of the Milgram experiment was to see if people would actually follow through with giving dangerous levels of electric shock, and the results indicated that they absolutely would. They would do that. And they did that because the person giving the instructions, the experimenter, continued to say the experiment requires that you continue. So the subjects, the participants in the study, continued, they continued doing the experiment, even though the direct consequences of their behavior was ostensibly to kill another person. So Milgram's experiment is a perfect example of compliance. We also see compliance, because we learned it at such an early age, we learned from when we're very young, to follow our parents' instructions. Now over time, our parents' esteem and what they think about us comes to mean a little bit less. We start to engage or seek out the attention and a claim or we start to seek out our own peer groups, and we kind of no longer care what our parents think about it, as we're getting a little bit older, this will circle back around when you become an adult, but for the most part, we become less compliant with our parents as their esteem and what they think about us matters less, because their reinforcers are less powerful. Remember, compliance is just the person gives you the instruction because they have the power to deliver the consequence if you follow or don't follow the instruction. You can contrast this with the phenomenon called tracking, which is where you follow an instruction and it turns out to actually be good advice. It allows you to contact reinforcement or avoid some sort of averse of consequence, but the consequence here is not given by the person who gave you the instructions. The consequence is just provided naturally. So for instance, if you were asking for directions from a stranger, the stranger's like, oh, yeah, go up there, make a right, you'll get to the parking garage. You're following those instructions and then naturally the environment is arranged such that it matches the verbal description, provided for you by the person who's not going to deliver a reinforcer. So they predicted the environmental circumstances that you're going to experience. Another example could be that you're given instructions, you don't follow those instructions and you get lost. You didn't follow those instructions. You don't contact the natural reinforcer. The difference here essentially is who's delivering the reinforcer. Both clients and tracking are categories of instruction following or rule-governed behavior, but clients is about following the rule because the person or the agent who gave you that rule also enforces that rule. They reinforce compliance or they punish non-compliance. They punish rule-breaking. Whereas tracking is when we follow the rule because the natural environment reinforces that behavior. The person who gave you the instruction predicted the upcoming environmental contingencies well enough to show you how to capture the reinforcer in those contingencies. Clients is closest to what Miller talks about as instructional training because remember that definition was the teacher provides the consequence, the teacher gives the verbal description, the winner emits the response, the teacher delivers the reinforcer. So Miller is describing clients. We also compare and contrast instructional training here with imitation training. In imitation training, the trainer is going to demonstrate the behavior, but you might find that in some of Miller's practice activities, there's a combination of a demo, like a modeling and a verbal description. And then you're talking about potential reinforcers, you know, is this clients or is this tracking? In another example, maybe your cat is showing you or tells you to use a stronger grip on your next swing is feedback, like good feedback. Yes, you did it and did it right. Is that a consequence that is a reinforcer? Maybe. What about tracking? Could we find that your cat gives you a piece of advice, your cat leaves, and then you use that advice and contact natural reinforcement? Yes, absolutely. Now, we're going to come back to the idea of imitation training. We're going to talk a little bit about that confusing bit where you have a combination of a verbal description and a demonstration because we get that in a lot of training. But I want to talk a little bit here about how do we make sure that other people are following our instructions? What do we do when people don't listen to what we have to say? Well, this happens pretty often. You know, managers need their employees to follow their instructions, roommates need to be able to help one another to live together successfully, spouses need to help one another to get that domestic harmony. And I mean, think about parenting children, you need your parents, you need your children to do the things that you're asking of them. When you think about instructions, remember that instructions are always going to be an antecedent that set the occasion for behaviors. The instruction occurs and then the behavior of following that instruction is what we're interested in. And when we're getting other people to follow our instructions, essentially what we're trying to do is please comply with my instructions. Please admit the behavior that I've just described for you. So in order to get that antecedent to have power, it's super, super important that we kind of follow through to make sure that the person actually does the thing that we asked of them. So we need to monitor to see if our instructions are followed. And we need to always have a programmed consequence that we give to folks for following our instructions. Remember, consequence can refer to a reinforcer. So if you're going to give an instruction, you got to make sure that you're following up and planning to reinforce when that instruction is followed. If you're thinking about instructions from the perspective of tracking, then you just have to make sure that you're giving good advice. If your advice is really rubbish and it doesn't actually communicate for folks what the environment is going to be like, then people aren't going to follow your advice anymore. If people are not following your instructions, you can troubleshoot that too. Perhaps you're giving so much information or too many instructions that you actually can't deliver consequences effectively for each one or maybe you didn't monitor the progress of the learner or if we're talking about tracking, maybe you need to check and see if your advice actually matched up with the contingencies that the person experienced. The problem here is, are you giving too much information, too many antecedent stimuli or is it because your verbal description didn't actually match the contingencies. So that brings me to this idea that your instruction absolutely must predict consequences if it's going to have any value. So let's talk about one of the best one of my favorite studies in all of psychology called a marshmallow study. So in this classic study, I'm going to post a cute video in the description and in our study guide in the original marshmallow study. Children are left alone for a brief period of time with a marshmallow and the researcher said, hey, I'm going to leave you for a couple minutes. I'm going to go down. I'm going to grab another marshmallow. If I come back and that marshmallow is still here. I'm going to give you another one. But if you eat the marshmallow when I come back, you don't get another one. That's the only one you get. So it's kind of a way of tracking how much self control a person has, whether they can wait to eat the marshmallow. And this is a super famous study. You've probably heard of it before. Now, researchers in this original study hypothesized that kids, some kids are just going to have better levels of self control than others. And in this particular study, the results of this original study, researchers actually found that there was a correlation between a child's ability to wait for that second marshmallow and some of the outcomes they had later in life. In this particular case, kids who could wait for that first marshmallow, when they could wait and then the researcher comes back and boom, they are in their second marshmallow. Those kids who had the capacity to wait are also the kids who had better grades, better social skills. They were less likely to get into trouble with the law or with their principal. They were more likely to avoid drug abuse. They had better outcomes overall. But we need to understand the role of the antecedent stimuli here. So there's a replication of the marshmallow study that was conducted recently within the 2010s. It was a Celeste kid replication of the marshmallow study. Celeste kids specifically wanted to evaluate what impact changing those antecedent stimuli would have on whether kids followed instructions. So in this replication, participants were given some toys and all these aren't really good crayons. We're going to we're going to do some stuff. But you know what? I'm going to go and I'm going to find I remember that the other researcher had a better set of art supplies. I'm going to go get them. This is the point when the experiment begins. Half of the children were promised better toys and crayons and art supplies. And when the researcher left, they came back with better toys and art supplies. But for the other half of the kids, the researcher promised better toys and art supplies, but they came back and they were like, Oh, I guess the good ones are gone. Someone else has them right now. So essentially what we have here is we have one set where the researchers promise matches what the environmental contingency is. We have another half of the kids where the promise does not match the actual environmental contingency. And the result here was that in this study, she ran through the original marshmallow study. She did this promise condition and then said, Okay, well, let's move on. What we're going to do is I'm going to leave you with the marshmallow. So she did the same marshmallow experiment. I'm going to give it to you. I'm going to leave for a couple minutes. I'm going to come back. If you don't eat the first marshmallow, I'll give you a second one. But here's where it gets really interesting. The kids who had those reliable adults, the kids who were in the condition where they were promised better toys and crayons and art supplies and received them were almost twice as likely to wait for the second marshmallow than the kids who were experiencing unreliable adults. Then the kids who were promised by the researcher that they were going to go and get the better art supplies and they came back empty handed. So I want to say that one more time. When kids were promised by the researcher that they would get better art supplies and the researcher delivered during the actual experiment kids were twice as likely likely to wait for the research and bring back the marshmallow. But the kids who were promised better toys and supplies and didn't get them from the researcher ate the marshmallow really quickly. Because again, when you're giving rules, when you're giving verbal instructions, you absolutely have to make sure that your antecedent stimulus predicts the consequence. Otherwise, the antecedent stimulus has no value. And that's the biggest place where people make mistakes. In summary, remember, instructional training involves describing a behavior and then reinforcing the behavior when it occurs. There are two kinds of rule, government behavior that we've talked about clients and tracking appliances when the instruction giver is also the person who's going to reinforce the instruction following. And tracking is where the instruction giver is not going to reinforce, but rather the natural environment reinforces. So following that good advice pays off for you naturally. But the most important thing to take away here is that your rules must accurately predict the consequences because if there's not perfect correspondence between the antecedent and the consequence, if your verbal rule does not perfectly predict what will happen, the verbal rule means nothing. And this is the biggest way in which our instructions come to lose their value, come to lose their power. So I hope that you've enjoyed this. If you have questions, please let me know. I'll see you next time.