VARIABLES AFFECTING CHOICE BETWEEN WORK ALTERNATIVES IN MENTALLY RETARDED ADULTS

Abstract

Four mentally retarded adults learned a work task with and without environmental work support, which consisted in assembling notebooks. The environmental support used containers in which to place different components and was designed to provide immediate feedback, to increase or maintain the rate of work response and to prevent errors during the task routine. Following initial training the subjects worked individually either under multiple schedules or under concurrent-chain schedules according to a multiple-element design. When the multiple schedule condition was in operation, the components were either presence or absence of environmental support, quasi-randomly distributed. In the concurrent-chain schedule condition, participant chose to do the task with or without the environmental support condition. When choice opportunities were given, preference was shown by two participants for the work support condition and no preference was observed with the other two participants. For all four participants the time spent to task completion and the average number of errors in performing the task decreased. Discussion offers some conjectures about possible variables controlling choice behaviors in the present work conditions.Keywords: concurrent chain schedules, multiple schedules, choice, preference, work, mentally retarded adults