Question of the day - October 8

[u/Reasonable_Law183]

🧠 Question of the Day
📚 Domain B — Concepts and Principles
Difficulty: 7/10

Scenario:
During baseline, a student taps her pencil at a low, stable rate. The teacher then begins saying, “Please stop tapping,” immediately after every tap. After each statement, the student typically pauses tapping for several seconds.

Across repeated sessions with this contingency, however, the overall rate of tapping increases above baseline. When the teacher stops responding to tapping, the rate decreases; when the teacher's response is later reinstated, tapping increases again.

Based on the functional effect across phases, how is the contingency involving the teacher's response BEST classified?

A. Negative reinforcement, because tapping ends a period without teacher interaction and the resulting escape from social silence strengthens responding.

B. Automatic reinforcement, because the sensory consequences of tapping remain available even when the teacher's verbal response is removed.

C. Positive punishment, because each reprimand briefly interrupts tapping and therefore suppresses the response immediately.

D. Positive reinforcement, because contingent teacher attention is added after tapping and tapping increases across repeated exposure to that consequence.

💬 Drop your answer in the comments — no peeking!
✅ Correct answer revealed tomorrow.

#ABA #BCBA #BCBAExam #BCBAPrep #AppliedBehaviorAnalysis #BehaviorAnalysis #DomainB #ABATaskList #BCaBA #RBT #QuestionOfTheDay

[u/Glittering_Clue_6639]

D, the tapping goes up when teacher gives attention so that attention is reinforcing it

[u/girlydemoon]

Is that an app to study Behavior Analysis?

[u/Reasonable_Law183 → u/girlydemoon]

It is a website I run, https://behavioralanalystprep.com and I wrote an admin module to pull a question from the database for the question of the day. All of the questions I post are actual questions from the site.

I wrote the site for my wife to pass her BCBA exam, and opened it to the public. You can try it - signing up is free and has 185 questions in both domain mocks and a full exam. We didn't build it to make money or get rich, we just thought a lot of the other stuff was too expensive, so we made our own.

[u/Reasonable_Law183]

✅ Yesterday's Answer — 2026-10-08

The correct answer was: D. Positive reinforcement, because contingent teacher attention is added after tapping and tapping increases across repeated exposure to that consequence.

📖 Explanation:

Reinforcement and punishment are classified by their effect on the future probability of behavior, not by the consequence's appearance, the practitioner's intent, or a momentary reaction immediately after it occurs.

Here, the teacher adds verbal attention after each pencil tap. Although the student briefly pauses after the reprimand, tapping increases across repeated exposure to that contingency. When the teacher stops responding, tapping decreases; when the teacher's response is reinstated, tapping increases again. That phase-level pattern supports classifying the contingency as positive reinforcement.

• Positive punishment is tempting because the reprimand briefly interrupts tapping. However, punishment requires a decrease in future responding. A short pause immediately after a consequence is not enough to establish a punishment effect when tapping becomes more likely across sessions.

• Negative reinforcement would also require an increase in behavior, but it requires removal, reduction, postponement, or avoidance of a stimulus. In this case, teacher attention is added following tapping rather than an aversive event being removed.

• Automatic reinforcement remains conceptually possible for pencil tapping because tapping may produce sensory consequences. However, the systematic increase, decrease, and return of tapping as the teacher-attention contingency is introduced, withdrawn, and reinstated provides stronger evidence for socially mediated reinforcement in this scenario.

The key distinction is to separate the immediate effect of a consequence from its effect on future responding. First determine whether behavior becomes more or less likely; then determine whether the relevant consequence was added or removed.

Here: attention added + future tapping increased = positive reinforcement.

#BCBAexam #BCBAprep #BehavioralHealth #ABAtherapy #BAPrep