BCBA exam prep: 525 practice questions in 3 timed tests

A is correct.Respondent conditioning occurs when a neutral stimulus is repeatedly paired with an unconditioned or already conditioned stimulus until the formerly neutral stimulus elicits a conditioned response. The dental chair was paired with painful procedures, so it now elicits a rise in heart rate; the change depends on a stimulus-stimulus relation, not on anything the child did. Operant conditioning changes behavior through the three-term contingency of antecedent, response, and consequence. Hand-raising increased because being called on and praised followed that response, which is a response-consequence relation. Calling both cases operant conditioning confuses elicited physiological responses with emitted behavior; the heart-rate change produced no consequence that strengthened it. Calling both respondent conditioning is also wrong, because the teacher did not pair a neutral stimulus with an eliciting stimulus; praise was contingent on the student's response. Labeling the first case negative reinforcement misidentifies the process, because nothing was removed contingent on a response and the heart-rate change is elicited by an antecedent stimulus rather than selected by its consequences. The key test is whether the change depends on a relation between two stimuli or between a response and its consequence.

C is correct.In backward chaining, the trainer completes or prompts all steps of the task analysis except the last one, and the learner performs the final step independently. Reinforcement is delivered immediately after the learner completes that final step, which links completion of the whole chain, a finished sandwich, with the programmed reinforcer. Once the final step meets criterion, the learner is required to complete the last two steps, then the last three, and so on, so every trial ends with the learner finishing the chain and contacting reinforcement. Delivering the reinforcer after the first step describes forward chaining, in which teaching begins with the first step of the task analysis and reinforcement follows that step before later steps are added. Reinforcing after every step regardless of who completed it weakens the contingency, because the client receives reinforcement for steps the technician performed, and it does not reflect how backward chaining is arranged. Waiting until the end of the session sacrifices the immediacy that makes reinforcement effective and fails to link the reinforcer to the final response. A key advantage is that the learner contacts the natural outcome of the full chain on every trial from the start.

D is correct.The Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts directs behavior analysts to prioritize positive reinforcement procedures and to recommend restrictive or punishment-based procedures only after demonstrating that desired results have not been obtained using less intrusive means, or when an existing team determines that the risk of harm to the client outweighs the risk of the intervention. Here, no function-based reinforcement has been tried and the behavior is not dangerous, so the BCBA should assess function, implement a reinforcement-based procedure, and evaluate the data before considering response cost, which is a negative punishment procedure. Implementing response cost because the teacher requested it ignores the requirement to try less intrusive means first; a stakeholder's request does not override the standard. Adding response cost alongside reinforcement from the start still introduces punishment before reinforcement alone has been evaluated, and an assumption that combined procedures work faster is not a justification the code recognizes. Declining the case is unnecessary, because a disagreement about procedures is better handled by explaining the rationale for reinforcement-first programming and collaborating with the teacher. Reinforcement comes first, and punishment requires evidence that less intrusive approaches have failed.

B is correct.Trials-to-criterion is a derived measure that reports the number of response opportunities needed to reach a predetermined level of performance, such as 90 percent correct across two consecutive sessions. Because staff count the teaching trials delivered before each learner met the mastery criterion, the director is using trials-to-criterion, which is well suited to comparing the efficiency of two instructional methods; the method requiring fewer trials produced faster acquisition. Percentage correct is used within this program to define the criterion, but the number being graphed is not a proportion of correct trials within a session; it is a count of trials accumulated until the criterion was met. Rate of responding expresses a count per unit of time, such as correct responses per minute, and nothing in the description involves timing the responses. Latency is the time that elapses between the onset of a stimulus, such as an instruction, and the initiation of the response, a temporal measure unrelated to how many trials were needed. When the question is how many opportunities a learner needed to master a skill, trials-to-criterion is the measure that answers it directly and allows fair comparison across teaching methods.

A is correct.Radical behaviorism, the philosophy of the science developed by Skinner, treats private events such as thinking and feeling as behavior that occurs within the skin and is governed by the same environmental variables that govern overt behavior; private events are therefore included in the analysis, although they are not treated as autonomous causes. The first researcher's view matches radical behaviorism. Methodological behaviorism acknowledges that private events may exist but excludes them from scientific analysis because they cannot be publicly observed and agreed on by independent observers, so only overt, measurable events count as data. The second researcher's view matches methodological behaviorism. Reversing the labels assigns each philosophy the other's position on private events. Mentalistic dualism explains behavior by appealing to an inner mental dimension, such as a mind or will, that operates apart from the physical world, which the first researcher rejects by treating thinking as behavior controlled by environmental variables. Cognitive psychology likewise treats thoughts as internal causes of overt behavior rather than as behavior to be explained, so it does not describe the first position either. The dividing line is whether private events are analyzed as behavior or excluded.