hi I'm Stefanie Perrin board certified
behavior analyst at Brett DiNovi and
Associates and I'd like to talk about
token economies and some of the
important considerations when designing
and implementing a token system here are
some of the task list topics that will
be covered in this discussion token
economy systems are very common
intervention used in the applied setting
however a lot of the times they are not
designed in based on empirical
literature Timothy Hackenberg in 2018
recently synthesized the applied and
basic literature and devised
evidence-based recommendations for
practice those recommendations fall into
three areas how to establish tokens as
conditioned reinforcers fading access to
the backup reinforcer and considerations
when regarding token loss as a form of
negative punishment tokens function as
conditions reinforcers due to their
pairing with an already established
reinforcer prior to implementing the
token economy time should be taken to
establish the tokens as a reinforcer as
opposed to just presenting the token and
the established reinforcer together it's
best practice to use a contingency based
pairing where a response produces a
token which is immediately exchanged for
the backup reinforcer
this teaches the exchange response and
establishes the token as a discriminant
immunise for the exchange during
acquisition tokens should be produced on
a rich schedule such as a fixed ratio 1
or an FR 1
additional token requirements can be
added to the system by systematically
adding tokens using backwards chaney as
you can see additional tokens are now
being added to the token system fading
access to the back of reinforcers can
occur in two ways one is to increase the
token production requirement and the
other one is to increase the exchange
production requirements and both of
these alternates have some limitations
increasing token production requirements
can result in effect such as ratio
strain so previously an individual would
complete one task and earn a token and
when you increase the token production
requirement they now have to complete
four or five demands to access the token
which can weaken responding to produce
the token whereas increasing the
exchange production schedule results in
a longer delay to the backup reinforcer
so instead of having to earn three
tokens you now have to earn five tokens
which in turns weakens the responding to
produce tokens early in the system
because the earlier token signal a long
delay to the backup reinforcers so we
need to look to the literature to help
determine which of these alternates is
best char bo and colleagues in 2006
suggested that the increasing the
exchange production schedule is the best
one reason for this is that as we
increase the number of tokens required
to produce the backup reinforcer we tend
to increase the magnitude of that
reinforcer one of the things that you
can do to mitigate the effects of early
tokens signalling those long delays to
the reinforcements is to transition to a
variable token exchange schedule in
doing this those early tokens do not
consistently signal those long delays to
reinforcement so some important
considerations as the number of tokens
produced increases you want to make sure
that you limit the individual from
saving tokens because sieve tokens will
weaken token production behavior in
addition you need to ensure to the
greatest extent possible that those
backup reinforcers are not readily or
freely available outside of that token
system
because if they are available all the
time this too will weaken that tofu
production behavior and the last area
that we're going to talk about is a
verse of control so it may be necessary
to combine punishment with token systems
and a common negative punishment is to
use token loss contingent on problem
behavior one advantage of token loss is
that the negative side effects that are
associated with punishments such as
escape and social disruption that we see
with other forms of punishment have been
reported infrequently when token lost is
used as a Punisher in a token economy
system however token loss can weaken
responding to produce tokens
especially if tokens are produced on a
ratio based schedule and one way to
address this is to transition to a
time-based production schedules such as
a variable interval schedule as these
schedules have been shown to be less
sensitive to the punishment effects than
our ratio based schedules and finally
for token loss to be most effective loss
of token should be contingent on problem
behavior immediate and those loss of
token should be large for example the
individual needs to lose all of those
tokens I hope you enjoyed the discussion
on token economy make sure you subscribe
to our channel and like this video and I
look forward to reading your comments
thanks
