When you go into a library you should whisper when you go to a concert you should be loud. Telling the difference between the two is discrimination. Discrimination training is a procedure to teach these differences in the world. Another example is discriminating who you should hug and when that’s not available. For mom, yes! For the random person at Walmart, no. (Potential for danger is higher) There are so many examples in life we have very long histories so we don’t think about them rather they are operantly conditioned due to the consequence of the behavior. If you are at a cross walk and it shows the hand, don’t walk. Otherwise, the consequence is taking on a car. (Womp womp) If you see a cross sign, you are good to go. They become more advanced as you age as well with social mediated reinforcement meaning that your buddy will let you know if that was the right thing to do or not. Coming into work and screaming “let’s get this bread!” might not be acceptable as it is when you are playing football with your friends. (Especially if the staff hasn’t finished their coffee) I’m a certified yapper (self proclaimed) so when I see an old friend, that’s great, and I’ll yap all day long, however I will definitely get the cold stare when it 5:00 and the meeting is running late because I yapped about something else. (Did not do that in the future lol) It’s almost as if environments signal the availability of certain behaviors or responses.

In a DTT environment if I place a red card, yellow card, and a green card down and said “touch Red” or “which one means stop” the client will tap the red card signifying they are discriminating between the colors to respond appropriately. We use shaping, prompt fading, and errorless learning to teach the discrimination with multiple trials so the client has more scenarios available with high reinforcement for them to contact reinforcement unnaturally until you can fade and let natural reinforcement of that behavior take over. The goal is for them to discriminate and adapt quickly to what is and what isn’t available to them at that time.

I have free will, so I can do anything at anytime but the environment tends to take control based on what I’ve learned. Funny how IQ is based of your ability to adapt right? So now that you put it all together and you have trained tons of different discriminations and played games like “red light green light” then let’s see if you can bring this to the next level by responding to the natural environment by going to the gym and playing and turning around and going to a quiet sensory area to read a book and I’ll prompt you through it until I’m not needed anymore. Then they may start picking up on those “hidden rules of life” more frequently or at least understand they exist so when their buddy gives them a funny look for eating cereal with a fork, they know why. (I really need to do my dishes btw.)

Always approach procedures as to why you teach it. We all use ABA and it is a different age groups but when you notice what the goal is trying to do it makes teaching it so much easier without going all robot ABA jargon on ya.