Selection-Based Instruction and the Emergence of Topography-Based Responses to Interview Questions

The process of teaching job interview skills to adults with intellectual disability can be time consuming and arduous for vocational developmental centers. On review of the existing literature, Schloss et al. (1988) recognized that although the social validity of interview skills has been well documented, few studies have attempted to validate effective strategies for teaching such behaviors. Behavioral skills training (BST) has been shown to be effective (Hall et al. 1980; Kelly et al. 1980; Schloss et al. 1988) but requires repeated instruction, modeling, rehearsal, and feedback. One strategy that might attenuate this issue has been subject to conceptual analysis in recent years. That is the potential of selection-based responding to promote the emergence of topography-based responding. Michael (1985) identified two types of verbal behavior: selection-based and topography-based. The former requires an effective scanning repertoire, a subsequent conditional discrimination between stimuli, and no point-to-point correspondence between the response form and the response product (e.g., choosing the correct answer during a multiple-choice examination). In comparison, the latter involves an increase in the strength of a distinguishable topography given some specific controlling variable and point-to-point correspondence between the response form and the response product (e.g., providing the correct answer during an oral examination). Since Michael’s seminal paper on the topic, researchers have continued to clarify the distinction between selection-based and topography-based verbal behavior. Potter and Brown (1997) have suggested that topography-based responses might promote the acquisition of selection-based responses in some contexts, especially in participants with extensive verbal repertoires. In examining the role of such verbal behavior, Potter et al. (1997) found that participants preferred selection-based tasks which incorporated a topography-based component when taught relations between sample stimuli consisting of flag-like patterns and comparison stimuli consisting of dot patterns. These researchers found that participants engaged in consistent vocal-verbal responding (i.e., problem-solving) during both selection-based tasks and selection-based tasks with a topography-based component. This finding was seen as support for the notion that some selection-based conditional discriminations, and emergent equivalence relations (see Walker et al. 2010; Lovett et al. 2011; Walker and Rehfeldt 2012), are promoted by topography-based vocal-verbal responding in individuals with extensive verbal repertoires. Indeed, it is likely that typically functioning adults engage in covert topography-based responses during selection-based tasks (e.g., multiple-choice examinations). Polson and Parsons (2000) commented on the concerns associated with ignoring the selection-based versus topography-based distinction and cautioned researchers on the use of selection-based match-to-sample (MTS) tasks. The current study sought to validate the use of a selection-based instructional protocol which included a topography-based component to teach intraverbal (i.e., a verbal operant evoked by a verbal discriminative stimulus and that does not have point-to-point correspondence with that verbal stimulus and that is followed by generalized conditioned reinforcement) responses to interview questions in two individuals with a learning disability.