Developing Appropriate Behavior with Fading

1. Developing Appropriate Behavior with Fading Chapter 9

2. Fading • Fading • Gradual change over successive trials of a stimulus that controls a response so that the response eventually occurs to a partially changed or completely new stimulus • Process of slowly removing prompts after behavior is established • Involved in everyday situations in which one person teaches a behavior to another person

3. Fading • Useful in situation in which a stimulus exerts strong control of that response to some other stimulus • Advantages over trial and error procedures: • Errors consume time • If error occurs, it tens to occur many times, even though it is being extinguished • Nonreinforcement of errors (extinguishing of errors) produces emotional side effects

4. Dimensions of Stimuli for Fading • Fading occurs along dimensions of stimuli • Dimension – any characteristic that can be measured on some continuum • Fading can occur across specific stimulus dimensions and across changes in general situation or setting • Ex: physical structure of room; number of other people present

5. Factors Influencing the Effectiveness of Fading • Choosing the final desired stimulus • Stimulus want to evoke or produce the behavior at the end of the fading procedure • Important to select stimulus that will be maintained in natural environment

6. Factors Influencing the Effectiveness of Fading • Choosing the starting stimulus – prompt • Stimulus that reliably evokes the desired behavior • Teacher behavior as prompts • Physical prompts/physical guidance – touching the learner to guide him appropriately • Gestural prompts - pointing, making motions without touching, etc. • Modeling prompts – demonstrating correct behavior • Verbal prompts – verbal hints or cues • Environmental alterations as prompts • Altering the physical environment to evoke desired response • Extra-stimulus vs within-stimulus prompts • Extra-stimulus – something that is added • Within-stimulus – alterations to the SD or S∆ to make them more noticeable and easier to discriminate

7. Factors Influencing the Effectiveness of Fading • Choosing the fading steps • Should be chosen carefully • Need to monitor performance to determine the speed of fading • If student begins making errors, prompts may have been faded too quickly or with too few steps • May need to backtrack

8. Guidelines for Effective Application of Fading • Choose final desired stimulus • Set an appropriate reinforcer • Choose the starting stimulus and fading steps • Put plan into effect