 All right, everybody, welcome back. It's Veronica Howard. So you'll recall last time we were talking about what is generalization? We talked about generalization training, discrimination training. We talked about the purposes of each. We talked briefly about what a stimulus class is and how you know whether a stimulus falls into a class. And we finished up by talking about a generalization gradient and visual representation of generalization in the presence of novel stimuli. This time around, let's talk about how do you get generalization? How do you make generalization happen? And remember that we think about generalization as being this very essential part of the human repertoire. We want people to be adaptable and flexible to be able to get along in new environments. But generalization may not occur innately. And you can find that when people have a behavioral repertoire that does not generalize well, we might call them kind of rigid, or we might say that they're having trouble adapting to a new environment. When we say that behavior occurs in a setting different from where it was originally trained, we're talking about generalization. Very often when we're doing a kind of generalization training, we'll have the instructional setting, the place where we did the original training, the instruction where we taught the person what to do. And we may be aiming to have that response occur in a new environment somewhere where we've never been before. This is called the generalization setting. It's a context that is different from where we originally taught the behavior. And we have a rich literature on how to actually teach generalization. So way, way back about 45 years ago, there was an article by Stokes and Baer where they talked about many different ways that you could use to promote generalization. We're actually going to talk only about a few today. We're going to talk about training hope. We're going to talk about programming common stimuli or how do you make the environment similar to where you did the training to increase the likelihood that the behavior occurs. And we're going to talk about training sufficient examples. These are the three that were covered by Miller in his textbook. But if you come back and you take, like, 400 strategies of behavior change, we will talk about all nine of these different strategies to promote generalization. Let's begin with training hope. Training hope is probably the worst method to promote generalization because, essentially, when we say we're training and hoping, what we're saying is, I'm going to teach the behavior. And I'm just going to cross my fingers and hope that generalization occurs innately. So training hope is kind of a non-procedure. You're not really doing anything. You're making no effort whatsoever to train generalization. And this is least likely to result in generalization to a new setting. If you are a clinical behavior analyst, it is your job to be planning for how to help your client, how to help them generalize their behavior to a new environment. So this is the very worst way of promoting generalization. You want to be thinking about, what is it that we're going to do to get this really good behavior that we're teaching into new places with new people and to new vistas of reinforcements? You might try to program common stimuli. Programming common stimuli involves teaching in the instructional setting and then making the instructional setting where you're teaching as similar as possible to the environment where you need that behavior to go. One of my favorite examples of programming common stimuli was a clinic in Chicago in the 1980s and early 90s where they were working with folks who had alcohol and substance misuse disorder. And essentially, the difficulty was that for many people, they had to go into bar settings. But every time they would go into a bar, it would really set the occasion for them to have a drink. It would be the discriminative stimuli where when they place their drink order, they would get a drink. So every time they would go into that bar, they would order a drink. It was almost kind of a trigger for them, but I hate using that expression, so don't use that. The bar was a discriminative stimulus for drinking alcohol. And the researcher in this case said, okay, we need to teach our clients to be abstinent. We need to teach them to abstain from ordering a drink and how do we do that? And the researchers created this really wonderful kind of fake bar, right? There was real alcohol in the walls. There was a real bartender who was actually a graduate student dressed up as a bartender and they would just go through trials of this person coming in and ordering something that wasn't alcohol, right? So every time that they would order an alcohol, the bartender would say, no, we're not gonna give you that. And every time they would order something else like a soda or a seltzer water, the researcher would give them that drink. So they just went through these opportunities. What makes this programming common stimuli was they created a whole bar in a treatment facility. It looked exactly like the real thing because they needed that ordering a non-alcoholic drink behavior to generalize out into the real world. And programming common stimulator is much more likely to result in generalization, but it's not guaranteed. Another example of this could be, for instance, you're trying to learn to drive. So maybe what we do is we kind of set up an environment that shares some features we wanna teach you to drive. So we're gonna let you go into a parking lot, which is kind of asphalt and you can drive around. But it's different enough so that you're not actually gonna hit other cars. So we're trying to make some things similar. We're trying to put you into the actual car environment, but we're making it different enough so we can safely train you. One of the big problems that folks have with video games is that there's some concern that maybe the video games themselves, particularly violent video games, could be potentially programming common stimuli for violence. So especially when you have first person shooter games, a lot of these stimuli share many common features with what it would be like if you were in fact holding weapon and using that weapon against other people. So programming common stimuli, it as a general procedure is value neutral, but you could see it could be used for some bad ends. Now I am not necessarily going to endorse the idea that video games cause violence. There's a lot of research that suggests that it in fact doesn't, but that's not the point of our conversation today. Another strategy that you can use to promote generalization is actually called generalization training. And this is a situation where we teach the learner a new behavior and we reinforce that learned behavior in a series of different new environments until we see that behavior generalize to lots of new places. And this strategy is really, really likely to result in generalization. So examples of this could be, let's go back to our apple example. You've been trained to those apples. You know in the presence of this SD, you give the response to apple and we go, yes, great job. When I do generalization training, I need to come up with lots of new examples that I can present you so that when you respond in the presence of those new examples that are all in the same stimulus class, I can reinforce you for same the same response. So I've trained you with a red apple. So I'm gonna get something that's kind of similar but not identical. I'm gonna get you a green apple and I'm gonna say, what's this? And if you give me the response apple in the presence of the green apple SD, it's similar enough. It's in the same stimulus class. We say, yes, earn the reinforcer. Now I need a stimulus that's still an apple but not the same apple. So I'm gonna get this one, maybe a jazz apple. I'm gonna say, what's this? In the presence of this SD, if you give me the response apple, yes, let's reinforce that. And then finally, I'm gonna give you something that's still technically an apple but it looks pretty different. And I'm gonna say, what's this? And if you say apple, yes, you earn the reinforcer. So this is strategically arranging lots of different circumstances where they're going to contact with a client is gonna contact a lot of different things that fall into that stimulus class. And you'll know generalization training has been successful. When you present them with a new stimulus and they admit that response without much help, without much prompting. Okay, so talking about generalization training, remember, this is a language peccadillo but behaviors generalize or discriminate. People do not. This is the same as before we said behaviors are reinforced, not people. And we should expect that it's kind of natural for some level of generalization to occur innately but you should never assume that it will occur. And a good clinical behavior analyst will always be having a plan. They will always make a plan to be teaching that skill in new environments when they need to. You could use programming common stimuli to make your training environment as much like the natural environment as you can or you can use strategic generalization training or multiple exemplars where you're getting lots of different opportunities so that you can have the client demonstrate the skill and then reinforce that behavior in lots of different environments. All right, come on back. We'll talk a little bit about the research and the applications of generalization. I'll see you guys next time.