Production and elimination of position-biased responding in stimulus preference assessments

Thesis (M.A., Psychology (Applied Behavior Analysis))--California State University, Sacramento, 2015.Position-biased responding is important to eliminate in stimulus preference assessments because it can lead to invalid assessment outcomes. Past research has demonstrated that manipulating reinforcer quality and magnitude may be effective in eliminating side bias in preference assessments. The purpose of Experiment 1 was to investigate other practitioner-friendly solutions to eliminate bias with children with developmental disabilities. Due to the inability to recruit a participant who met our inclusion criteria, the procedures were not evaluated. Experiments 2 and 3 were conducted to evaluate the effects of effort manipulation on production of positional bias and methods to eliminate bias with four typically developing preschoolers using a translational preparation. The results of these studies suggested that positional bias was produced when effort for making selections to one side of an array was high, and a quality training procedure was effective in eliminating this bias. However, treatment effects did not generalize when quality training was removed.Psychology (Applied Behavior Analysis