 All right everyone welcome back. We are going to finish up by talking about other examples of advanced stimulus control. We're going to be talking about chaining or behavior chains and we're going to talk about task analyses. So these are used for phenomenally complex multi-step behaviors and these when we're talking about building a habilitative repertoire, when we're talking about teaching people the complex skills that they need to be successful in their everyday lives we're really talking a lot about these. These chaining and task analysis skills are what we're going to be using when we're teaching most people how to go about living in a complex society. Let's start with chaining. A behavior chain or a behavioral chain is a series of these discrete responses that are sequenced in a particular order and the chain is important because we use this to train really complex behaviors or behaviors that require multiple steps. The steps have to go in order and the reason that the order is important is because one step is going to be the discriminative stimulus to emit the next step and then emitting that step is going to reinforce the previous step and set the occasion for the next one. So it's like this interlocking set of contingencies and lots of different small responses that all fit together to make a larger more complex response. The reinforcer is typically delivered for the final response in the chain and that's the kind of thing that keeps the entire chain going. Examples of this could be like this is just a super basic example. We know that if I were to give you a set of aural or herd auditory stimuli, if I were to say ABCDEF, many of you have probably already filled in the last one because all of those stimuli, ABCD, were used to hearing them in that order and that sets the occasion for the next phrase in the song. So the ABCD, sung in that kind of intonation, sets the occasion for the next response. We've had a long history of this stimulus proceeding and predicting that the responsible contact reinforcement if we emit it. This is an example of a behavior change but let's break it down a little bit. I'm going to break it down with a different example. Do you remember when you were younger and you used to go to the park, you used to play on slides and swings? Tell me about the slide. Remember that it's this tall imposing metal figure and in order to get into position to actually contact the reinforcer which is going down the slide, there's a set of steps we have to go through. So in this case, you have to approach, physically approach the slide. You have to get into a position where you can get near the ladder. Running to the slide is a discriminative stimulus. It provides an opportunity to emit the next response in the chain which is climbing that ladder, putting one little foot in front of the other. So the next response that occurs is starting to climb up that ladder. Running to the slide made climbing the ladder possible. That was an SD. It said that in the presence of this, then you will be able to emit the response and contact reinforcement. So starting to climb the ladder reinforces approaching the slide and running to the slide sets the occasion for climbing the ladder. Now on the next step of this, climbing the ladder is the discriminative stimulus. It's the thing that you do to make the opportunity for the next behavior sliding down possible. Climbing the ladder is the discriminative stimulus. It sets the occasion for you to sit down on your little fanny and go down the slide. So climbing the ladder is the discriminative stimulus for sliding down the slide and sliding down the slide is the reinforcer for climbing up the ladder. And then the whole thing starts up again. You're at the bottom of the slide which sets the occasion for you to run around back to the ladder and then you begin the process over again. Let's go with one that's a little bit controversial. I'm going to give you another example of a behavior chain. This is one that most of us will do two or three times a day. Tooth brushing. How do you brush your teeth? Well, there's a series of small responses that you have to emit in a particular order. Let's just assume you're in your bathroom, you're standing in front of the sink, you're ready to go. The first step is the first link in the chain is typically picking up your toothbrush. Picking up your toothbrush is going to set the occasion for the next step in the chain. This is usually where we get a fight. There's usually some folks in one of two camps, either the adding the water camp or the adding the toothpaste camp. Some folks will say, no, no, no. You get the brush and you put the toothpaste on. Picking up the brush, set the occasion for you to add the toothpaste. That's the next step. And then you run it under the water. Others will say, no, you're a heater. You pick up your brush, you get it wet, and then you add your toothpaste. It doesn't matter to me how you do it. The point is, picking up the brush sets the occasion for you to do the next step. Doing the next step reinforces picking up the brush. The next step also sets the occasion for the response that comes after. Let's just assume that you're a water-paste person. Once your toothbrush is picked up, it's wet, it's got toothpaste on it. What comes next? Well, then you put it in your mouth, putting it in your mouth. That's the occasion for actually brushing back and forth at all the quadrants. This reinforces the step before. That's the occasion for the one that comes after, spinning and rinsing. So, behavior chains are these linkages that fit together. And it's a lot of little tiny behaviors that together make a larger, more complex task. And it's often you can see that they kind of fit together. And if you break or don't do one step, then you can't really do the ones that come after. In this case, you can't add water and toothpaste if you didn't pick up the brush initially. So, you have to admit these, at least most of them, in a particular order. Because if you don't, then you won't achieve that particular outcome. Another way of analyzing and breaking down complex tasks and understanding how to do them is something called a task analysis. A task analysis is kind of two parts. It is both a process. It is the procedure of taking an incredibly complex task, like tooth brushing. Okay, well, what does tooth brushing entail? Well, you break it down to all the component parts like we did before. And then you actually have steps, a step by step, how to process, how to do it. So, a task analysis is both the analysis of the task and it's the written set of instructions, the written step by step product that's created. It's the how-to of that task. And when we start getting into more complex skills for learners that are maybe a little bit older, this is where we have to start breaking those skills down to make them really easy. Think about this. Think about how you get dressed in the morning. We know that there are certain things that you have to do to be fully dressed. And so, if I'm trying to break it down like I'm doing for a Martian, like they've never been here before, so I have to explain to them how you do it in the simplest terms possible, getting dressed in the morning might look a little bit like this. So, I'm trying to take my pants off. So, step one, grab those pants, right? Grab them by the waist. Next, pull your pants down. Now, you need to take your pants off. You probably don't want to fall over. Maybe you've got some mobility stuff. So, we're going to have you sit down next. Then we're going to have you reach across the midline, grab a pant leg, pull it off. Then we're going to hold the ankle of the leg and pull your feet out. So, you are breaking down a task that we all take for granted that we all do very simply every day. And you are bringing it down into the most simplistic terms possible. There's one surefire way of knowing if your task analysis is discrete enough if the tasks are broken down into enough detail and specificity to be effective. And it's kind of difficult because you actually have to run people through your task analysis. You have to use it to see if it works. And I'm going to post a link to this video because it's one of the best things that I enjoy watching. If you have not watched this exact instructions challenge video before, it was a meme that was very popular three or four years ago where people would take everyday tasks and they would ask people to provide them a set of instructions on how to do those everyday tasks. And I'm actually going to encourage you, if you are watching this video right now, stop, pause this video, check out the description. I'm going to post a link there for the exact instruction challenge for this particular task of just making a peanut butter sandwich. The simplest food task you can do. And in this particular video, the dad asks his two kids to write out a set of instructions for how to make a peanut butter sandwich. Like I said, if you haven't seen it, pause now. Go watch that video and then come back. I want to talk about that. Okay, so if you're back, then I assume that either you've watched the video or you stopped before or you watched it and came back. This is such a delightful video to watch. And it's so kind of cringey to watch because these kids, you can see from this person's expression, she's very unhappy with the experience of doing the exact instruction challenge. But it really helps highlight how difficult it can be to set or to create a set of instructions that's foolproof. What I want to do for a second is switch and talk about the reaction of the teachers in this case. So in that video, the children who were creating that exact instruction challenge who were creating this set of instructions were getting really, really frustrated with their dad. They were getting emotional and they were threatening violence. And eventually one of them just gave up and they were like, you know how to do it. I know you know how to do it. They were very, very upset. But why? Why was it that the folks who were trying to come up with those instructions were getting so angry? And why did we get so much variability? And why did they give up? Well, we know this. We know that conceptually the teachers, the kids in this case, they're teaching behavior, their behavior of creating instructions that were meant to evoke the consequence of a finished peanut butter sandwich. Their behavior was placed on extinction. Their instructions were never capable because of their trolling dad who was being hyper-specific and intentionally trying to get a rise out of them. Those kids never contacted reinforcement for their teaching. They were getting very frustrated and they were getting really cranky about it. You could see them start to resent their learner a little bit. And I always include this video. This video is really important because it helps remind us that we are going to be those kids. Every one of us is going to be those kids. So it's important to take a beat to check ourselves for those signs of frustration. And when you start getting really grouchy and getting really cranky and starting to resent your learner because of course they know how to do it. You've seen them do it before. What's wrong with them? When you start seeing your learner fail to make the response, the organism is never wrong. Skinner said the organism is never wrong. So that means that we need to stop. We need to take a breath. We need to relax. We need to take a moment and come at that teaching from another angle. And remember how incredibly complex skills can be. Think about something as simple as sending an email. Here is one flowchart of what it takes to send a response. I mean look at this. You have to start whatever your processor or your email program is. You press a new button. Then you have to figure out is the person in your address book. And then yes, if they are then click the two and so on and so forth. This complex kind of flowchart shows you the many small pieces that can be in the task analysis of a behavior that we all kind of take for granted that we do every day. So when you're looking at these skills, remember that they can be incredibly complex. Something I want to leave you with, remember the organism is never wrong. The organism will always do their best to contact reinforcement under the circumstances. And if there's a reason that the learner is not performing, it's either because they lack the skill. They don't actually know how to do the behavior that will contact the reinforcer or they don't know the circumstances under which they should do that behavior to contact the reinforcer or they lack the motivation. The reinforcer may not be effective. You may not have an effective reinforcer. So you need to troubleshoot. Is it a skill deficit or is it a motivational deficit? If it's a skill deficit, teach the skill. Go back, break it down, make it smaller, add prompts if you need to. If it's a motivational deficit, you've got to go back to the drawing board and evaluate whether you're using an effective reinforcer. And if not, figure out why. Check the four principles of effective reinforcement. Make sure the learner is deprived of the reinforcer that it's delivered immediately, that the size is worthwhile, and that you're really only using the reinforcer for this target response. And if you're not sure you have an effective reinforcer, go back even further. Do a reinforcer assessment. Do some naturalistic observations. See what the learner likes. There's often some confusion about what is chaining compared to other strategies. So let's compare and contrast chaining versus reinforcement shaping and task analysis. When we talk about chaining, remember those behaviors have to be completed in a particular order in order to produce the outcome. For reinforcement, it's just a behavior. If the target behavior happens, it's relatively small and discreet. If the behavior happens, reinforce it. Shaping, we start with a rudimentary form of the response and then we expect more and more refined versions of that behavior. So chaining is not a multi-step process. It's not that you have to do one little behavior and then add on an additional behavior and then do more of an additional behavior. You're actually going from a raw behavior or a rudimentary form into more refined, more skilled, more selective form of the behavior. Shaping is a single response that gets more skillful over time. And chaining, a series of steps where one sets the occasion for the next and reinforces the one that comes before versus task analysis, that's a hard discrimination to make. But task analysis is both a process and a product and it's taking the complex skill, analyzing it and breaking it down. If it has to be completed in order, then you could be looking at a chain. If it's just a series of steps that have to be completed and can be completed in any order, it might just be a task analysis. So just to summarize here, remember that when we're talking about chaining, it's a series of responses that have to occur in a particular order. The completing one step reinforces the one prior sets the occasion for the one that comes next and the reinforces delivered at the end. When we talk about task analyses, we're saying that's both a process as the analysis of the task as well as the product or the written set of instructions that we produce to describe how to do the behavior. Task analysis product, that set of instructions, can sometimes describe a behavior chain if the steps have to occur in order. And then finally, remember that these teach advanced skills. We use these to teach complex skills and we owe it to ourselves and to the folks that we support and that we're teaching to be calm, to be patient, and check if you're having some difficulty. Are you looking at a skill deficit where you have to teach the behavior? Or are you looking at a motivational deficit where you have to troubleshoot why the reinforcer is not working? Because ultimately, remember, organism is never wrong. Thanks so much for joining me. I'll see you guys later.