Chapter 12 – Changing the Stimulus Control of a Behavior With Fading

Peter, diagnosed with ASD, possessed an extensive vocal mimicking repertoire. He repeated many of the words other people said but had little other verbal behavior. He would imitate many words, even when it was not appropriate. Fading is the gradual change over successive trials of an antecedent stimulus that controls a response so that the response eventually occurs to a partially changed or completely new antecedent stimulus. Peter would at first say his name only when it was said to him. In any situation in which a stimulus exerts strong control over a response, fading can be a useful procedure for transferring the control of that response to some other stimulus. Errorless discrimination training is the use of a fading procedure to establish a stimulus discrimination so that no errors occur. In general, a dimension of a stimulus is any characteristic of a stimulus that can be measured on some continuum.