The Effect of Joint Control Training on the Performance of Multiply Controlled Behavior: A Systematic Literature Review Relevant to Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Other Developmental Disabilities

A Tutorial on the Applications of Lowenkron's Joint Control to Language Acquisition Programs

Mediating one's behavior through covert or overt verbal behavior is a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has had to remember a phone number with no way to write it down, follow a recipe without consulting the cookbook for each step, or solve a math equation without a calculator or pencil and paper. Jointly controlled responding is a type of multiply controlled responding that may provide a behavioral analysis of such mediating responses. Joint control, as we will discuss in detail, involves one or more verbal responses bringing other verbal or nonverbal responses to strength under appropriate controlling conditions. The present article will provide guidance for practitioners on how to apply evidence-based methods to teach jointly controlled responses, provide guidance for development of instructional programming, and suggest future applications for using the concept of joint control.

Facilitating the emergence of intraverbal tacts by autistic children via joint control

Rodriguez et al. (2022) discovered that teaching four component skills was sufficient to facilitate the emergence of intraverbal tacts across four applications with three participants. Our study replicated and evaluated an extension of this procedure that was directed at facilitating intraverbal tacts when a child learns the component skills but continues to fail to produce intraverbal tacts. The extension consisted of procedures to enhance the divergent control exerted by the auditory stimulus (i.e., the question) and the discriminability of joint control. Intraverbal tacts emerged for all three participants after undergoing the extension procedures. These results are discussed in the context of a conceptual analysis of intraverbal tacts and the potential role of joint control.

The Effects of Vocal Blocking on Sequencing Visual and Tactile Stimuli

The inclusion of private events in the philosophy of our science is integral to avoid dualism and remain objective rather than making assumptions about an unseen mind. However, the inclusion of behaviors and stimuli which cannot be observed in an analysis poses obvious issues. One established method of studying covert behavior is to examine tasks that are presumed to require verbal mediation, and observing how a participant's performance is affected when they are required to speak out loud during the task (often called "blocking"), again presuming this will make it difficult or impossible to simultaneously talk to yourself covertly. This study investigated the effects of vocal blocking on a sequencing task, or lining things up in a specified order. In one experiment, the items sequenced were abstract line drawings, and a second experiment used differently textured fabric stimuli (or "tactile cards"). In the second experiment, participants learned to tact and then sequence the tactile stimuli while they were blindfolded. The effect of vocal blocking on putative covert rehearsal was dissimilar across the two modalities of the experiments. This preliminary study provides insight into the nature of covert behavior as it relates to different senses and opens questions about the generality of studies examining covert mediation.