 All right, everybody. Welcome back. It's Veronica Howard. So I know this whole time we've been talking about behavior and we've been talking about the consequences of behavior, but we've left out something that's really important when you're trying to evaluate what's happening with a person's responses. We've kind of left out the context where that behavior occurs. And so remember, we need to know about where behavior occurs. We need to know that our client is emitting behavior in a particular context. So let's go back to basics. Let's just talk about our ABCs. We've talked about behavior. We've talked about consequences, but we have to really understand the environment that sets the occasion for behavior for us to understand why our client chooses to emit certain responses under certain circumstances, which is to say, remember that behavior doesn't occur in a vacuum. We want to understand where our client is coming from. So we have to understand a little bit more about the context in which their behavior is occurring to help them out. So remember, we have behavior. Behavior is followed by consequences. Those consequences influence the future rate of the behavior. Reinforcement results in more behavior. Punishment or extinction will result in less behavior, but we want to be adding in this third layer of understanding now. So we're going to switch to talk about antecedents. The stuff that happens before behavior, they can set the occasion for that response and the antecedent then influences whether or not the behavior occurs. So throughout this entire topic, we're going to be talking about antecedents. We're going to be talking about the context around behavior. Sometimes you'll hear behavior analysts refer to something called the three-term contingency, and that just refers to the antecedent or the context where the behavior occurs, the circumstances surrounding the behavior. They'll talk about the behavior itself. We define it. We measure it. We try to figure out what it happens and what makes it go up and what makes it go down, and we talk about the consequences, the effect that the behavior produces in the environment. This is even itself a little bit simplistic because you'll remember before we've talked about the four-term contingency. Insofar as we also want to be thinking about establishing operations or motivating operations, those things that change the value of reinforcement, motivation operation is some sort of environmental event that's going to change or alter the value of the reinforcer. An establishing operation increases the value of a reinforcer. A abolishing operation decreases the value of the reinforcer. So if we pop back just really, really quickly here, when we add in an establishing operation, it's going to increase the value of the reinforcer. It might actually change or increase the rate of the behavior because the reinforcer is more valuable. A couple more definitions that you'll want to know moving forward. We talk about discriminative stimuli. A discriminative stimuli or an SD is a stimulus that's present when and only one reinforcement will occur. So it tells or predicts or communicates to the learner. If you emit the response under these circumstances, then you are likely to contact reinforcement. And remember discriminative stimuli developed through experience, either through direct experience, having been in that environment before and contacted that reinforcer. You could also have a kind of rule governed or you could communicate to the learner that under these circumstances, if you emit the response, then you'll contact reinforcement. But let's focus on the direct experience for the most part here. We also talk about things called S deltas or a stimulus delta and S delta is a stimulus or environmental circumstance that's present when if the behavior occurs, it will not contact reinforcement. So an example of SD versus S delta would be imagine that you're very thirsty, you're coming into class in the morning, you pass a vending machine, it's got all these wonderful energy drinks, the light in the machine turns on. That light turning on is a discriminative stimulus. It says, hey, drinks are available. If you put your money in me behavior and you press the buttons, then you'll get the drink consequence. But if you walk past the vending machine and light doesn't turn on, or you're looking at the vending machine, there are no lights on, there's no indication that it's going to take your money. In that case, under those circumstances, your behavior of putting the money in and selecting a beverage may not be reinforced. Lights on would be a discriminative stimulus, whereas lights off may be an S delta. We also want to talk about a discriminative stimulus for punishment. So this is a special stimulus that is present when punishment will occur for a behavior. So most of us, for instance, if we're passing a police officer and we might be exceeding the speed limit a little bit, we'll slow down because that police officer is a discriminative stimulus for punishment. They're the context that says if you're emitting naughty behavior right now, we will pull you over and give you a ticket. So when you're evaluating the three term contingency, look to see whether there are predictors, environmental circumstances that could communicate to the learner what's going on in those circumstances. And finally, I want to leave you with some language. When we talk about behavior that is more likely to occur under some circumstances rather than others, when we have a behavior that's more likely to occur in the presence of a discriminative stimulus than in the absence or in the presence of the S delta, we see that we have a discriminated behavior or a discriminated response. So I'm including this really wonderful far side cartoon by Gary Larson, because this is a perfect example of behavior that's not under stimulus control. This is not a discriminated response because in the presence of this particular SD, the sign, we should see one and only one response. We should see the pull response occurs much more often than what you see happening here where the student is pushing on the door. So this behavior is not under stimulus control. This is not a discriminated response. In order to have a discriminated behavior, you'll have to have one response become more likely in the presence of that stimulus than in the absence. We don't see that here. So come on back. We'll give some more examples of discrimination training and how it occurs in practice, and then we'll apply this or we'll synthesize this information with some other content that you may have learned in other courses. I'll see you guys next time.