A Program of Stimulus Control for Establishing a One-Minute Wait for Reinforcement in Preschool Children. Progress Report.

As a result of findings of a previous study, this study, which sought to program preschool subjects to wait one minute for reinforcement, used pause-building procedures before delay conditions were started. The children, 3- to 5-year-olds, were designated either Baseline (control) subjects (n=3) or Programmed (experimental) subjects (n=5). Though procedures varied in detail for each subject, the general plan followed was for the Baseline subjects to be put right into 60 second delay periods (after initial pause-building training) and for the Programmed subjects to receive a program of training steps in addition to the pause-building training before facing the 60 second delay of reinforcement. These training steps involved multiple schedules of continuous reinforcement and progressive differential reinforcement, discriminative stimuli that were gradually faded out, and increasing delay of reinforcement. The pause-building training, apparently a prerequisite for successful entry into the training program, was effective, and so was the programmed training for the experimental group, but only up to the point where discriminative stimuli for not responding were faded out. (MH)