ABAT FREE Procedures and Intervention Questions and Answers 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A behavior analyst observes that a client's problem behavior temporarily increases at the onset of an extinction procedure before decreasing. This phenomenon is known as:
- Behavioral contrast
- Extinction burst (Correct answer)
- Spontaneous recovery
- Resurgence
Correct answer: Extinction burst
An extinction burst is a temporary increase in the frequency, intensity, or duration of a behavior when extinction is first implemented.
Question 2: A BCBA is using video modeling to teach social skills to a child with autism. The child watches a peer perform the target skill and then imitates it. This procedure relies primarily on which behavioral principle?
- Operant conditioning through direct reinforcement
- Observational learning and imitation (Correct answer)
- Classical conditioning
- Shaping through successive approximations
Correct answer: Observational learning and imitation
Video modeling uses observational learning, where the learner acquires behavior by watching and imitating a model rather than through direct reinforcement of their own responses.
Question 3: A behavior analyst arranges the environment so that a skill taught in the clinic occurs naturally in the home and community settings. The MOST important element of this generalization strategy is:
- Using the same therapist in all settings
- Training sufficient exemplars across settings, materials, and people (Correct answer)
- Reducing reinforcement density in the clinic
- Implementing punishment for non-generalized responses
Correct answer: Training sufficient exemplars across settings, materials, and people
Training sufficient exemplars—varying the people, settings, and materials during instruction—is one of the most effective strategies for promoting generalization.
Question 4: A practitioner is teaching a nonverbal child to request preferred items by pointing to picture symbols. Over time, the child begins to use the picture symbols in novel situations without prompting. This demonstrates:
- Response maintenance
- Generalization (Correct answer)
- Errorless learning
- Stimulus control transfer
Correct answer: Generalization
Generalization occurs when a learned behavior spreads to new stimuli, settings, or situations beyond those in which it was originally trained.
Question 5: Which of the following best describes the role of an establishing operation (EO) in a behavior intervention plan?
- It provides a consequence that increases future behavior
- It alters the effectiveness of a reinforcer and the current frequency of behavior it maintains (Correct answer)
- It describes the topography of the target behavior
- It identifies the function of behavior through observation
Correct answer: It alters the effectiveness of a reinforcer and the current frequency of behavior it maintains
An establishing operation (a type of motivating operation) temporarily increases the value of a reinforcer and the frequency of behaviors that have produced that reinforcer in the past.
Question 6: A BCBA notices that a client's tantrums occur most frequently on Monday mornings after the weekend. A sleep diary reveals the client sleeps poorly on weekends. The poor sleep most likely functions as:
- A discriminative stimulus for tantrum behavior
- An abolishing operation reducing the effectiveness of social praise
- An establishing operation increasing the reinforcing value of escape (Correct answer)
- A conditioned punisher for compliance
Correct answer: An establishing operation increasing the reinforcing value of escape
Poor sleep is a setting event/establishing operation that increases the aversiveness of demands and therefore increases the reinforcing value of escape, making escape-motivated tantrums more likely.
Question 7: A behavior analyst is designing an intervention for a client who engages in property destruction maintained by tangible reinforcement. Which antecedent modification would MOST directly address this function?
- Providing non-contingent access to preferred tangibles on a fixed-time schedule (Correct answer)
- Using extinction by withholding attention following property destruction
- Implementing a token economy based on academic task completion
- Reducing the density of reinforcement in the environment
Correct answer: Providing non-contingent access to preferred tangibles on a fixed-time schedule
Providing non-contingent access (NCR) to preferred tangibles reduces the establishing operation for tangible-maintained problem behavior by pre-satisfying the motivation.
ABAT FREE Procedures and Intervention Questions and Answers 5
A behavior analyst observes that a client's problem behavior temporarily increases at the onset of an extinction procedure before decreasing.
This phenomenon is known as: