The Effects of Peers Versus Adults on Observational Conditioning‐By‐Denial

ABSTRACT The Observational Conditioning‐by‐Denial Intervention (OCDI) has been shown to establish new conditioned reinforcers when peers served as confederates. The present study used a pre‐post intervention design with an embedded reversal design to test whether observing an adult confederate instead of a peer yielded similar results for three preschool‐aged participants. In the first intervention condition, an initially neutral stimulus was delivered to an adult confederate while the participant observed and was continually denied access to the stimulus following simultaneous responding to a given task. The intervention was introduced for a minimum of eight sessions and continued until one of the following termination criteria was obtained: (a) a decrease in correct responding to zero, (b) orienting responses to the neutral stimulus or mands for the stimulus decreased across sessions, or (c) two or more mands were emitted by the participant for the stimulus across consecutive sessions. The second intervention condition was identical to the first except a peer served as the confederate. The results indicated that the OCDI effectively altered the reinforcement value of the initially neutral stimuli across all participants only when peers served as confederates. These findings extend previous OCDI research by demonstrating that the peer plays a significant role in the conditioning of reinforcers through observation.