Taylor E. Johnson & Mark R. Dixon. (2009).
Influencing children’s pregambling game
playing via conditional discrimination training.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis,
42, 73-81.
Past research has demonstrated a transformation of stimulus functions
under similar conditions using gambling tasks and adults (e.g., Zlomke
& Dixon, 2006), and the present study attempted to extend this research.
Experimenters exposed 7 children (ages 7 to 10 years) to a simulated
board game with concurrently available dice differing only by color.
Following initial exposure to the game, participants were trained to
discriminate between two contextual cues representing the relational
frames of more than and less than. Following the training procedure,
experimenters reexposed participants to the simulated board game. Six
of the 7 participants demonstrated an increased preference toward the die
with the color that had been paired with more than during the conditional
discrimination training.
DESCRIPTORS: addiction, children, gambling, prevention, relational
frame theory, risk taking