Evaluating Patterns of Preference Displacement Including Social Interactions

Abstract

When teaching new skills to children, it is important to identify potential reinforcers. These typically involve food, drinks, and toys or games. Preference assessments are important procedures with predictive validity and time efficiency in applied work to identify putative reinforcers. Preference can be displaced, meaning one stimulus class is disproportionately preferred over another. This is evaluated by presenting highly preferred stimuli from two classes in one combined-class assessment. Initial research on this topic reported that preference for edible stimuli displaced leisure stimuli. Though the leisure items were displaced, further analysis demonstrated these stimuli still functioned as reinforcers. The clinical implication from this finding was that edible and leisure stimuli should not be combined in a preference assessment because the disproportionate preference for edible items may mask the reinforcer efficacy of leisure items. Research since the initial study, however, has conflicted the findings by showing that leisure stimuli are not always displaced. No published research has evaluated preference displacement when combining edible items and social interactions, though there is research on the preference and reinforcer efficacy of social interactions. The purpose of the current research was to investigate whether children’s preferences for social activities or edible stimuli remained stable or were displaced when available simultaneously.