Alan Poling

Western Michigan University | WMU · Department of Psychology

Students with intellectual and other developmental disabilities often require substantial support to acquire the skills needed to secure work experience and paid employment. Prior findings suggest that video prompting is likely to be an effective and feasible strategy for establishing such skills. To evaluate this possibility in a special education...

We examined articles with experiments published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and in Behavior Analysis in Practice from 2017 through 2021 to determine how frequently procedural fidelity was assessed. When procedural fidelity was assessed, we determined how often a measure of interobserver agreement for those fidelity data was provided...

Physical activity has many benefits, but many individuals with developmental disabilities fail to exercise regularly. Procedures in which consequences were arranged for exercising, alone or as part of a treatment package, have consistently increased physical activity by members of this population. We review 19 studies that arranged such procedures....

The European Journal of Behavior Analysis was analyzed to determine the gender of authors from 2000 through 2020. We quantified the percentage of women and men as contributing authors and as first authors, articles that included at least one woman or man as an author, articles that included at least one woman and one man as authors, and total numbe...

The World Health Organization estimates that only 25% of adults meet the current recommendations for weekly exercise. Adults with an intellectual disability are less likely to meet these standards than other people. In the present study, a classroom wide treatment package that arranged individualized daily choice (between dancing and strength train...

Resurgence refers to a behavioral process in which a recent response is extinguished (or reinforcement conditions worsen) and a previously extinguished response recurs. In previous research, resurgence has been reliably produced when the resurgence procedure is repeated. Changes in the degree of increase of the resurging response across iterations...

We examined publication records in the Brazilian Journal of Behavior Analysis from 2005 through 2020 to determine the participation of women and men as contributing authors. We assessed the following variables: authorship (in general), first authors, articles with at least one woman, articles with at least one man, articles with both men and women,...

Women have played, and continue to play, an important role in behavior analysis. Their participation as authors of journal articles and as journal editors was first quantified in 1983 and has been the topic of several subsequent articles. Other articles have addressed other aspects of women’s participation in the discipline, but no review of articl...

We investigated the applicability of the generalized matching equation to 6 Division I women’s volleyball teams. Data were collected on team allocation of 2 kinds of offensive attempts, spikes and tips, and on the number of points immediately earned by those responses. The equation accounted for at least 50% of the variance in performance for 3 of...

Objectives Aripiprazole (Abilify) is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating irritability associated with autism in young people and is widely used for that purpose. Our objectives were to summarize the conclusions of other authors who reviewed the effects of aripiprazole in people with autism spectrum disorder, to analyze critica...

A substantial, and seemingly increasing, number of Board Certified Behavior Analysts work in pre-K–12 schools. Many of them will be unfamiliar with the roles and activities of other school professionals, as well as with the structure, function, and mandates of schools. This article introduces 6 websites that are devoted to education. Accessing thes...

Participating in athletics confers a wide range of benefits, regardless of participants’ gender or disability status. Our review of 95 behavior-analytic sports-performance articles revealed that over half of them included at least 1 female participant, but only 5 included at least 1 participant with a reported developmental disability. Given that f...

We examined citations of Murray Sidman's publications in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior from the journal's inception in 1958 through May 2020. On average, he was cited 35.6 times per year. The rate of citation did not change substantially across time and the cumulative citation count was 2,212. His 10 publications cited most o...

Data were compiled and assessed for the percentage of authorship, percentage of first-authored publications, percentage of publications with at least one woman, and percentage of publications with at least one man. From the journal’s inception to 2018, women and men accounted for 33% and 67% of authorship, respectively. The data suggest that women’...

The motivating operations concept has improved the precision of our approach to analyzing behavior; it serves as a framework for classifying events that alter the reinforcing and punishing effectiveness of other events. Nevertheless, some aspects of the concept are seriously flawed, thereby limiting its utility. We contend in this article that the...

We applied the generalized matching equation to examine the relation between attacks attempted and points scored by the top five attackers on 36 Division 1 National Collegiate Athletic Association women’s volleyball teams during the 2017–2018 season. Twelve of the teams were highest-ranked at season’s end, 12 were mid-ranked, and 12 were lowest-ran...

The job market for certified behavior analysts currently is excellent, which poses a serious challenge for organizations looking to hire such individuals. We evaluated whether the provision of small giveaways at a recruitment booth set up at two behavior-analysis conferences and at a university career fair influenced the relative number of attendee...

Since 1997, APOPO, a non-profit organization based in Tanzania, has deployed African giant pouched rats (Cricetomys ansorgei) to detect landmines in post-conflict areas. More recent research suggests the pouched rats can also be trained to detect tuberculosis in human sputum samples. Despite proven success on both tasks, the potential impact of eac...

The motivating operations concept has been of considerable interest and practical value to behavior analysts, including practitioners. Nonetheless, the concept has generated substantial controversy and has significant limitations. To address some of these limitations, we suggest that it would be wise to redefine motivating operations, to deemphasiz...

This study replicated and extended the use of a web‐based multiple‐stimulus‐without‐replacement preference assessment (Curiel, Curiel, Li, Deochand, & Poling, 2018) by adding a web‐based single‐operant reinforcer assessment. Five adults diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder participated in this study. The web‐based program identified preference h...

We examined self‐ and cross‐citations in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA) and the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB) from 2004 through 2018. Mean annual levels of self‐citations for JABA and JEAB were 40.1% and 28.7%, respectively. Overall, 5.1% of JABA citations were JEAB articles, and 2.3% of JEAB citations wer...

We determined inter-rater agreement for the VB-MAPP, an instrument sometimes used in planning educational goals and evaluating intervention effects for young people with autism. A pair of raters independently rated each of 32 children diagnosed with autism. Intraclass correlation coefficients for the total Milestones and Barrier scores were 0.876 a...

The term “contingency” has long been widely used by behavior analysts, but their uses of the term are inconsistent with the vernacular definition of the term. Moreover, the term is not consistently defined by behavior analysts, but is instead used to refer to a variety of relations between and among stimuli and responses. In the interest of reducin...

We examined publicly available faculty salaries for men and women faculty members at 16 university programs accredited by the Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI). Overall, 52.4% of the 103 faculty members were women, although there were twice as many men as women at the full-professor level. Our data suggest that ABAI-accredited...

The motivating operations concept has generated substantial conceptual analysis and research interest. Following an analysis of how motivating operations affect behavior, one which emphasizes the interactive role of motivating operations and discriminative stimuli, we propose: a) redefining motivating operations as operations that modulate the rein...

Exercise benefits adults with developmental disabilities. A prior study demonstrated that a treatment package comprising goal setting and fixed-ratio 1 reinforcement for goal attainment substantially increased walking. However, continuous reinforcement delivery may be untenable due to cost and time. In an effort to develop a more practical package...

Background: Levamisole (LVM) is a common adulterant in clandestinely manufactured cocaine (COC), with a range of well-documented deleterious health effects. Although the prevalence of LVM in COC has been widely noted, the subjective effects related to concomitant COC-LVM administration are poorly understood. Aims: The present study sought to compa...

Basic research is intended to increase the understanding of a phenomenon. The actions of living organisms, behavior, is the phenomenon of interest to the discipline of behavior analysis, and disclosing how environmental variables affect behavior is the general goal of basic research in the field. The purpose of this series of three special sections...

We evaluated the use of a clicker sound as a conditioned reinforcer to teach behavior interventionists appropriate clinical skills during in-situ training. A multiple-baseline-across-behaviors design indicated that the intervention was effective in increasing all target behaviors for all participants. For two of the participants, we conducted maint...

An examination of article authorship and editorial board membership for 7 behavior–analytic journals from 2014 to 2017 revealed that, compared to findings from prior years, women’s participation has increased substantially. This finding is heartening and shows the value of persistent efforts to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to succeed in...

A web-based program was developed to conduct brief multiple-stimulus without replacement preference assessments for videos (e.g., movies, cartoons, music videos). The preference assessment program was used with two populations: young adults with developmental disabilities and school-age children with emotional and behavioral needs. Stimulus prefere...

People with autism spectrum disorder often receive psychotropic medications and two drugs, risperidone and aripiprazole, are approved for treating “irritability” in this population. A number of authors have suggested that behavior analysts can contribute to the prudent use of such drugs, but little is known regarding Board Certified Behavior Analys...

Levamisole (LVM) is often added to illicit cocaine, but the reason for this is unclear. Previous research indicated that LVM sometimes increases the rewarding effects of cocaine, as measured by conditioned place preference. The present study examined the acute effects of LVM pretreatments on cocaine self-administration by rats. If LVM substantially...

Two drugs, risperidone (Risperdal®) and aripiprazole (Abilify®), are approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating “irritability” in young people with autism and are often used for that purpose. Several other drugs also are commonly prescribed in the hope of improving behavior. This chapter overviews the use of behavior-change drugs in...

Many individuals with autism spectrum disorder simultaneously receive 2 or more drugs intended to improve their behavior, but few studies have evaluated the effects of such polypharmacy. This article summarizes those studies that have systematically examined the effects of risperidone, an antipsychotic drug that is approved by the U.S. Food and Dru...

Animal olfactory detection of human diseases has attracted an increasing amount of interest from researchers in recent years. Because of the inconsistent findings reported in this body of research and the complexity of scent detection research, it is difficult to ascertain the potential value of animal detectors in operational diagnostic algorithms...

Giant African pouched rats (Cricetomys ansorgei) have been employed successfully in two operational tuberculosis-detection projects in which they sniff sputum samples from symptomatic individuals who have visited tuberculosis clinics. The prevalence of pulmonary tuberculosis in this population is high, approximately 20% in the regions where the rat...

Background African pouched rats sniffing sputum samples provided by local clinics have significantly increased tuberculosis case findings in Tanzania and Mozambique. The objective of this study was to determine the reproducibility of rat results. Methods Over an 18-month period 11,869 samples were examined by the rats. Intra-rater reliability was a...

Happiness is an important component of the quality of life of older people, but happiness is a construct, not a thing, and it is difficult to quantify. The present study examined the feasibility of having participants and observers quantify participants’ level of happiness by pointing to line drawings of faces depicting different emotions, like tho...

The current Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association indicates that the sex, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and disability status of research participants should be reported. The present study found that most (90.6%) of the manuscripts describing clinical interventions and published from 2013–2015 in five journals sympath...

Timeouts are sometimes used in applied settings to reduce target responses, and in some circumstances delays are unavoidably imposed between the onset of a timeout and the offset of the response that produces it. The present study examined the effects of signaled and unsignaled timeouts in rats exposed to concurrent fixed-ratio 1 fixed-ratio 1 sche...

This article overviews behavioral pharmacology and introduces the articles that appear in this special issue, which is devoted to the discipline. By combining the methods and concepts characteristic of the experimental analysis of behavior with those characteristic of pharmacology, behavioral pharmacologists historically have made, and currently ar...

For several years, my students and I have assisted colleagues at Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling, a Belgian Nongovernmental Organization headquartered in Tanzania, in conducting research designed to evaluate and improve the performance of scent-detecting pouched rats used for humanitarian purposes. Findings indicate that the ra...

Tuberculosis (TB) is a major problem in poor countries because sensitive diagnostic tools are unavailable. In 2014, our pouched rats evaluated sputum from 21,600 Tanzanians and 9,048 Mozambicans whose sputum had previously been evaluated by microscopy, the standard diagnostic for TB. Evaluation by the rats revealed 1,412 new patients with active TB...

In 2014, 1.5 million people died of tuberculosis (TB), a disease that can be cured in nearly every case if detected in time. Rapid and accurate detection of TB is a crucial component of the World Health Organization's 2016–2035 End TB Strategy [1]. Pouched rats, Cricetomys ansorgei (previously called Cricetomys gambianus [2]), are able to detect My...

Research on joint control has focused on mediational responses, in which simultaneous stimulus control from two sources leads to the emission of a single response, such as choosing a comparison stimulus in delayed matching-to-sample. Most recent studies of joint control examined the role of verbal mediators (i.e., rehearsal) in evoking accurate per...

Despite its characteristically low sensitivity, sputum smear microscopy remains the standard for diagnosing tuberculosis (TB) in resource-poor countries. In an attempt to develop an alternative or adjunct to microscopy, researchers have recently examined the ability of pouched rats to detect TB-positive human sputum samples and the microbiological...

Standard operating procedures have been developed to train Cricetomys to locate humans in collapsed structures and return to the release point on command. The present study demonstrated that the schedule of reinforcement for target location influences the rats' performance. Rats required more time to locate targets when no reinforcement was arrange...

We examined the species used as subjects in every article published in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB) from 1958 through 2013. We also determined the sex of subjects in every article with human subjects (N = 524) and in an equal number of randomly selected articles with nonhuman subjects, as well as the general type of e...

It has been reported that females are underrepresented in several areas of psychological research, which may have significant clinical and theoretical implications. No one has reported, however, whether women are underrepresented in behavioral gerontology research. To make this determination we recorded the gender of participants in behavioral gero...

APOPO has employed pouched rats as mine detection animals for approximately 10 years in sub-Saharan Africa, where the species is indigenous, and now plans to deploy the rats in areas where they are not indigenous. In order to prevent the possible introduction of an invasive species in those regions, all rats must be castrated prior to deployment. T...

Pouched rats were employed as mine-detection animals in a quality-control application where they searched for mines in areas previously processed by a mechanical tiller. The rats located 58 mines and fragments in this 28,050-m(2) area with a false indication rate of 0.4 responses per 100 m(2) . Humans with metal detectors found no mines that were n...

In this editorial, Alan Poling says it is an honor to serve as the first editor of the Behavior Analysis Today section of Behavior Analysis: Research and Practice . It is also a daunting task, as there is no shortage of good outlets for articles dealing with behavior analysis. Poling believes, however, that Behavior Analysis: Research and Practice...

Giant African pouched rats equipped with video cameras may be a tenable option for locating living humans trapped under debris from collapsed structures. In the present study, 5 pouched rats were trained to contact human targets in a simulated collapsed building and to return to the release point after hearing a signal to do so. During test session...

If the illicit tobacco trade were eliminated, governments would gain at least $31.3 billion a year and over 164,000 premature deaths a year would be avoided after 2030 (Joossens and Raw, 2008). Dogs have been used successfully in tobacco control programs and there is a good chance rats could also play an important role. In the present experiment, g...

This paper reviews the current status of the Motivating Operation Concept (MOC), followed by a critical response to Whelan and D. Barnes-Holmes (2010), who argued against the MOC and proposed an alternative analysis of motivation, the Consequence-Valuing Operation (CVO). In this paper, we: (a) review the MOC and discuss its conceptual and empirical...

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The present study used a multiple-baseline design to illustrate the effectiveness of an intervention package consisting of a multipurpose job aid and feedback training in improving the performance of supervisors and animal trainers in a nongovernmental organization headquartered in East Africa. Prior to the intervention, the performance of three su...

Every article published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management from 1982 through 2012 that contained the term motivating operation (or a related term) was examined. Seventy-six articles used a relevant term. Authors used the term in attempts to categorize and explain the behavioral effects of many aspects of interventions (e.g., rules...

Five giant African pouched rats detected 10-fold dilutions (95.3% sensitivity) and 100-fold dilutions (78.8% sensitivity) of broth from cultured Salmonella enterica serovar Saint Paul inoculated into dried horse feces. All rats demonstrated some generalization to more dilute concentrations and analyzed 50 samples in less than 20 minutes. These find...

Because the location of landmines is initially unknown, it is impossible to arrange differential reinforcement for accurate detection of landmines by pouched rats working on actual minefields. Therefore, provision must be made for maintenance of accurate responses by an alternative reinforcement strategy. The present experiment evaluated a procedur...

Research articles involving participants with an autism spectrum disorder and published from 2010 through 2012 in Autism, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Journal of Child Psychology and Child Psychiatry, and Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders were examined to determine the reported gender of participants. The overall male:female r...

Previous studies have shown that pouched rats can detect the presence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which causes tuberculosis, in human sputum samples obtained from clinical facilities. Although pouched rats evaluate sputum samples quickly, preparing the samples is relatively slow. The present study evaluated whether the rats can detect tuberculos...

In recent years, the motivating operation (MO) concept and the terms associated with it, including "reinforcer-abolishing effect" (Laraway, Snycerski, Michael, & Poling, 2003), have been widely used in the behavior-analytic literature (Laraway, Snycerski, Olson, Becker, & Poling, in press) and elsewhere (Lotfizadeh, Edwards, & Poling, 2013). MOs ar...

The effects of clonazepam (0.25–4.0 mg/kg) and phenobarbital (10–80 mg/kg) were examined in pigeons responding under a multiple fixed-ratio 50 fixed-interval 90-sec schedule of food delivery. When given acutely 30 min prior to testing, the lowest dose of each drug generally increased responding under both components of the multiple schedule, wherea...

The effects of tripelennamine (3, 6, 12, 18, and 24 mg/kg) and pentazocine (5, 10, 20, 30, and 40 mg/kg), given alone and in selected combinations, were determined in rats performing under a fixed-ratio 30 schedule of food delivery. Each drug alone produced generally dosedependent decreases in response rates. Combinations typically produced effects...

Pouched rats can detect Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which causes tuberculosis, in human sputum. Historically, a phosphate-buffered saline solution was added to sputum in the belief that doing so improved rats' detection ofM. tuberculosis, but no relevant data were available. Experiment 1 evaluated rats' performance on samples with and without phosp...

The development of tolerance to morphine was examined under discrete-trial procedures in which (1) keypecks produced food delivery (fixed ratio 1), (2) keypecks had no effect on food delivery (automaintenance), and (3) keypecks prevented food delivery (negative auto- maintenance). Morphine at doses of 8 and 16 mg/kg initially decreased pecking unde...

Setting. Tanzania. Objective. To compare microscopy as conducted in direct observation of treatment, short course centers to pouched rats as detectors of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Design. Ten pouched rats were trained to detect tuberculosis in sputum using operant conditioning techniques. The rats evaluated 910 samples previously evaluated by sme...

We determined the reported ages of participants with autism (or autism spectrum disorders) in 146 intervention research studies published recently in four prominent journals. Most participants were between two and eight years of age and only 1.7% of them were 20 or more years of age. These findings suggest that the special needs of older people wit...

This article describes Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling (APOPO) recent use of specially trained African giant pouched rats as detectors of pulmonary tuberculosis in people living in Tanzania. It summarizes the achievements and challenges encountered over the years and outlines future prospects. Since 2008, second-line screening...

Functional behavioral assessment (FBA) refers to a range of methods designed to identify the environmental variables that control problematic behaviors. Methods for collecting these data revealing these variables include indirect measures, such as interviews and questionnaires, or direct methods, such as narrative recording of the antecedents that...