Behavior Analysis
Lecture4
increasing THE FREQUENCY OF BEHAVIOR –
prompting and fading
Review
 What is reinforcement?
 It’s the procedure of providing consequences for a behavior
that increase or maintain the frequency of that behavior
 And consequences I refer to are called?
 Reinforcers
 A reinforcer is?
 An event that, when made contingent on a behavior, increases
or maintains the rate of that behavior.
 Reinforcement is a powerful procedure, but you
cannot reinforce a behavior that doesn’t occur. One
way to get a behavior to occur is to use prompts.
Prompts
 Informally, a prompt can be defined as a cue or hint
meant to induce a person to perform a desired
behavior
 But the flash card definition is
Prompt: an antecedent that induces a person to
perform a behavior that otherwise does not occur
Prompts
 Behaviorists generally recognize 5 different types of
prompts:
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Verbal
Gestural
Physical
Modeling
Environmental
Verbal prompts
 Verbal prompts involve spoken words, written words
or even parts of words
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For example, if I asked you to define reinforcement then I
could start off the definition ‘It’s the procedure of providing
consequences….’ This is a verbal prompt
Or if you meet a shy 2 year old and ask ‘what's your name’ His
mother may say to him ‘say Billy’. She is attempting to prompt
the appropriate reply to your question
Verbal prompts
 Teachers tend to use verbal prompts a lot
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Imagine a child who cannot remember the word that describes the
greatest football team in Turkey. The teacher might say ‘Gala…
 Instructions are other types of prompts.
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If the coach says ‘to write a good essay, it must have an introduction
and a conclusion’ then this could be a prompt.
 However, it is important to note that it only counts as a
prompt if the prompt has the desired effect i.e. if you do
include an intro and conclusion in the essay.
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Teachers often make this mistake. They use rhetorical questions as a
way to prompt thinking, however if the questions don’t stimulate
thinking then they haven't prompted new behavior
Gestural prompts
 Gestural prompts involve facial expressions and
posture.
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For example, a teacher may restore order to the class by
putting her fingers to her lips.
 Remember, however, that prompts are only prompts
if they have the desired effect.
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Imagine for example a kids educational TV program. There is
no way to know if the gestural prompts have their desired
effect because the audience is at home
Physical prompts
 The use of physical prompts is often called physical
guidance
 It means guiding the person’s body through the
required movement.
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For example, you will often see men showing women how to
swing a golf club!
Here the man is physically prompting the appropriate
behavior
Modeling prompts
 Another way of prompting is to demonstrate or model it.
 Most children learn to imitate modeled behavior
sometime during infancy
 And once a child will imitate modeled behavior, models
are an extremely efficient way of prompting desired
behavior
 Parents often use modeling
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For example your parents probably taught you to use knives and
forks by modeling prompts
If you want to teach a kid to ring 999 in an emergency, then
modeling the behavior on a pretend phone will do the trick
 Those are the 4 basic types of prompts, some people also
recognize environmental prompts as the 5th type
Environmental prompts
 An environmental prompt is an arrangement of the
physical environment that induces the desired behavior.
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For example, my dog really struggles to get into the car so I built her
a ramp. However Henry wouldn’t use it at first. Since the use of the
ramp did not occur naturally, I had to prompt the behavior. So I
walked up the ramp myself, I tried physical guidance but these things
didn’t work.
So I tried to modify the environment by blocking off other access to
the car. If Henry could not get in the car in any other way, then he
HAD to use the ramp!
 I had modified the physical environment in such a way
that the desired behavior was more likely to occur
Prompts
 Remember that a prompt is a way of getting a person
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to perform a behavior that does not usually occur.
But in order to maintain or increase the frequency of
the behavior you will still have to reinforce it.
Like a prompt gets the engine going, but
reinforcement keeps the car running!
The reason you prompt a behavior is so that you
can reinforce it
Importantly, many of these prompts are used
together to produce the desired behavior
Prompting and Fading
 Prompting is only the first step of the prompting and
fading procedure
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For example, if you prompt the shy kid with ‘say Billy’ when he
is two years old, and he repeats ‘Billy’ then that’s great. But you
don’t want to have to do this when he is 20 years old!
 That’s why the prompting and fading procedure is
important
Prompting and fading
 The action of a prompt is prompting
 Prompting means inducing the person to perform a desired
behavior by presenting a prompt
 The flash card definition is
Prompting: the procedure of providing antecedents
that evoke a target behavior.
 However, although prompts are very helpful, sooner
or later we want to be able to do things on our own.
 Therefore it is important to wean people off prompts
if possible
Fading
 Behaviorists usually wean people off prompts
through a procedure called fading
Fading: gradually reducing the strength of a prompt
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For example, how do we get 2 year old Billy from repeating the
prompt ‘say Billy’ to a point where he will say it by himself?
In order to do this we have to gradually reduce the prompt
There are a number of ways to do this:
Say Billy, Say Bill, Say Bi, Say B
 Whisper is more quietly until you are lip synching
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Task
 I want you to think of examples of prompting.
 Then I want you to think about how you would fade
that prompt.
 You have 15 minutes
Studies of Prompting and Fading
 Prompting and fading tends to be used by parents,
teachers and other who try to build new skills
 However the majority of empirical research involves
severely disturbed or handicapped people
 We we now look at two studies:
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The first involves an autistic boy (Wolf et al, 1964)
The second involves a person with schizophrenia (Wong &
Woolsey, 1989)
Wolf et al (1964)
 Richard was a 3 and half year old autistic boy with
lots of problems; tantrums, eating problems and so
on.
 He also did not speak.
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However he did sometimes sing the words of various songs
that he liked.
But he wouldn’t say ordinary kinds of things and would only
mimic like a parrot: if you said to him, ‘hello Richard’, he
would say ‘hello Richard’ back!
 The therapist aimed to get Richard talking in a more
normal way
Wolf et al (1964)
 The training began by showing Richard five pictures one
at a time, and prompting him to name the item shown.
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For example the teacher would show him a picture and say ‘this is a
cat, now say cat’.
 The teacher would repeat this several times until Richard
said ‘cat’. After which she would praise him immediately
and give him a bit of food!
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At first the teacher tried candy and fruit as reinforcers but these
didn’t work with Richard.
So the researchers ended up using Richards breakfast and lunch
meals as reinforcers.
 When he answered correctly, the teacher would give
Richard a bit of breakfast or lunch.
Wolf et al (1964)
 After several days of training, Richard could name all of
the words, so the researchers began fading the prompts.
 They then moved onto other types of words
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Household items
Abstract nouns
More complicated questions
 Richards progress continued so that by the time he was 5,
he was much more verbal and could speak without adult
prompts
 This was remarkable at the time, because before behavior
analysis, parents of autistic children were told to put
their kid in an institution and forget about them!
Wong and Woolsey (1989)
 These researchers used prompting and fading to re-
establish basic conversational skills in chronic
schizophrenics.
 In order to do this they used a specific prompting
procedure:
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If the behavior does not occur, you provide a weak prompt.
If it still doesn't’t occur you provide a stronger prompt
And so on!
When the behavior finally occurs you reinforce it.
Then you move back down the scale until the behavior occurs
following the weak prompt or no prompt at all
Wong and Woolsey (1989)
 One patient was a 44 year old woman named
Theresa who had been in a psychiatric hospital for 14
years.
 Her level of conversation was low, so the researchers
aimed to re-establish 5 basic conversational skills,
such as:
 Returning a greeting, answering a question like ‘how
are you
 Researchers took a baseline measure of Theresa’s
behavior, twice a day for 5 days in a week.
Wong and Woolsey (1989)
 Training consisted of prompting and reinforcing the
appropriate behavior
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The trainer would start with the natural cue (hello Theresa) and wait
ten seconds for the reply
If Theresa did not answer the researcher would provide instructions
and model the behavior.
The researcher would then test Theresa again.
If she still didn’t respond then he would use a stronger prompt e.g.
candy
 Baseline data showed that Theresa’s conversational skills
were close to non-existent
 With prompting and fading, they improved dramatically.
 Maybe a graph would make this clearer…..
Rules for prompting and fading
 The proper use of prompting and fading can be a
very important part of an effort to increase the
frequency of a target behavior
 There are 4 rules that will help you to make effective
use of this procedure
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1. Define the target behavior
2. Identify suitable prompts
3. Prompt, reinforce, then fade
4. Monitor the results
Define the target behavior
 As always, we begin by defining exactly what
behavior we want to change.
 In this case that means identifying the behavior that
we want to prompt
 Be as specific as possible
Identify suitable prompts
 You need to identify a prompt that will reliably
produce the behavior.
 There are usually any number of events that will
serve as prompts.
 In selecting, its generally best to begin with the
weakest one.
 This is because eventually you will want to fade the
prompt altogether, and this will be more difficult
when the prompt is stronger
Prompt, reinforce, and fade.
 The reason for prompting behavior is so that you can
reinforce it. If you don’t reinforce the prompt will lose its
power
 Prompting and not reinforcing behavior is pretty
common
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e.g. think of a teacher that says ‘look at me’ but does not reinforce the
behavior of looking at her when the behavior occurs
 If you provide the prompt and behavior does not appear
then you will have to try a stronger prompt until it does.
When it does, reinforce it!
 After this you begin to fade the prompt, you must move
back down the ladder of prompts!
Monitor the results
 You must always monitor the results to see if you are
progressing.
 It will also inform your use of prompting and fading
e.g. you could fading the prompt too quickly.
Problems with prompting and fading
 The goal of prompting and fading is to have the
target behavior occur reliably in appropriate
situations
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You prompt the behavior so that you can reinforce it
You fade the prompts so that the behavior occurs without them
 To achieve this you must fade the prompts gradually
 People often have a hard time with fading, when you reduce
the prompt too quickly, the behavior wont occur
 On the other hand, if you fade the prompt too slowly the
process could take years!
 It is therefore different and experimental with each
client
Flash cards
 Prompt
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antecedent that induces a person to perform a behavior that otherwise does not occur
 verbal prompt
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a prompt with spoken or written words or parts of words
 gestural prompt
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a prompt involving facial expressions and posture
 physical prompt
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a prompt that uses physical guidance
 modeling prompt
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a prompt that demonstrates or models the behavior
 environmental prompt
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an arrangement of the physical environment to induce desired behavior
 prompting
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procedure of providing antecedents that evoke a target behavior
 fading
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gradually reducing the strength of a prompt
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