Pre-assessment exposure to schedule-correlated stimuli affects choice responding for tasks

Establishing compliance with academic and daily-living-skills instructions is important for shaping and maintaining behavior. In the current study, we exposed two participants to two stimulus conditions that were correlated with different consequences (more work vs. reinforcement) subsequent to a baseline in which responding was undifferentiated. Exposure to the differential consequences produced greater cooperation with the instruction to "pick one" task and response allocation towards the stimulus that was correlated with reinforcement as a consequence for task completion. These results suggest that clarifying the consequences of choice making may facilitate cooperation with task instructions.