Multiply Controlled Behaviours and Waiting

Are you teaching your clients how to wait for preferred people/items/activities? Learning how to wait is a vital skill that is taught to learners as part of Functional Communication Training (FCT). But it’s not always easy to teach this skill when target behaviours are multiply controlled. Sumter et al. explored this challenge in their 2020 article titled “Providing noncontingent, alternative, functional reinforcers during delays following functional communication training” summarized below.

Functional Communication Training

FCT identifies the reinforcers that are maintaining problem behaviours, withholds access to these reinforcers immediately following problem behaviours (i.e., extinction), prompts an alternative functional communication response (FCR), and delivers those reinforcers immediately following that FCR. But this does not always translate to the real world. Parents and caregivers may not be able to deliver these requested reinforcers immediately, and hence, run the risk of those problem behaviours re-emerging.

Progressive Delay Fading

Progressive delay fading is a common strategy for teaching learners to wait. The learner makes a request but delivery of the requested person/item/activity is delayed for a target duration. Delays are short at first and increase progressively as the client’s waiting skills improve. But there are drawbacks to this approach. Even when this treatment is effective, it takes a long time, and problem behaviours may still occur as the delay increases. But what if there was a way to supplement this treatment with non-contingent access to alternative reinforcers?

What did they find?

For individuals whose problem behaviours were sensitive to multiple sources of reinforcement (i.e., multiply controlled), providing access to alternative, functional reinforcers during delays mitigated the increase in problem behaviours during delay fading, replicating previous studies by Austin and Tiger (2015). The authors suggest a few possible explanations for these observations.

• Engaging with the alternative reinforcer competes with occurrences of the problem behaviour.

• If you have taught your learner how to request their preferred people/activity/item (alternative functional communication response), but then introduce a delay, problem behaviours are likely to emerge as the newly taught response is extinguished. 

• Engaging with the alternative reinforcer may compete with the effects of extinction on the alternative functional communication response.

• The alternative reinforcer may abolish the value of the delayed reinforcer

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References

Austin, J. E., & Tiger, J. H. (2015). Providing alternative reinforcers to facilitate tolerance to delayed reinforcement following functional communication training. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 48(3), 663–668. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaba.215

Sumter, M. E., Gifford, M. R., Tiger, J. H., Effertz, H. M., & Fulton, C. J. (2020). Providing noncontingent, alternative, functional reinforcers during delays following functional communication training. Journal of applied behavior analysis, 53(4), 2319–2329. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaba.708