Across-Subject Generalization of Attending Behavior as a Function of Self-Regulation Training

Abstract

Under investigation was the effect of a target child's regulation of his own attentive behavior upon the attentive behavior of a non-reinforced adjacent peer. Two black males, third graders from an urban elementary school, served as subjects. The target child received training in self-regulation of attentive behavior, while the adjacent peer received no training. An ABAB withdrawl design was used to assess the degree of generalization of treatment effect across subjects. During the treatment phase, the target child gave himself points contingent on his attentiveness. These points were exchanged for back-up reinforcers. For the duration of the study, the adjacent subject's increases in attentive behavior were parallelled by the non-targeted, adjacent subject's increases in attentiveness.