TREATMENT OF ESCAPE-MAINTAINED ABERRANT BEHAVIOR WITH ESCAPE EXTINCTION AND PREDICTABLE ROUTINES

We evaluated the effects of two daily activity schedules on 2 particip ants' rates of aberrant behavior and their compliance. Functional anal ysis identified the operant function of the participants' aberrant beh aviors to be escape from tasks. Participants were taught to use stimul i contained in daily schedules, and were tested based on a modified st imulus-equivalence model that consisted of flash cards and activity sc hedules comprised of words or photographs that corresponded to the par ticipants' daily activities. On pretests, the participants demonstrate d simple and conditional discriminations with the photographs but not with the printed stimuli. A time-delay procedure was used to teach the participants to name the flash cards. Following training, the printed activity schedules corresponded to lower rates of problem behavior an d higher rates of compliance than the photographic activity schedules. Performance on posttests indicated the establishment of functional cl asses of stimuli involving the flash cards and activity schedules even though this type of correspondence was not directly trained.