Organization for Reinforcement Contingencies with Animals

A few ORCA members presented their research at UNT's Behavior Analysis Research Colloquium (BARC) on Friday! Trinity Beaty discussed her Silent Shelter thesis project, Sarah Owen talked about the Transfer of Stimulus Control: Revisiting the Delayed-Cue Procedure, and Maia Huff-Owen shared her preliminary research on Extinction and Variability: Function, Cause or Context?

All three presentations prompted excellent questions and discussion from the audience.

Thanks to Maia, Trinity and Sarah for sharing their research, and of course to ORCA advisor Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz!

ORCA students are doing AMAZING things! ORCA Student Group President Hannah McGee was interviewed for the Animal Training Academy podcast with host Ryan Cartlidge!

Hannah and Ryan have an in-depth and informative discussion of assent, a topic Hannah has studied extensively as part of her thesis work under the guidance of Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz.

We hope Hannah's podcast sparks some ideas for how to better address assent in training programs. Great work, Hannah!!

Congrats to Behavior Explorer employee Hannah McGee who was featured in Episode 213 of the Animal Training Academy podcast.

In the episode, host Ryan Cartlidge interviews Hannah about the topic of assent.

Assent is a popular topic these days when working with both human and animal learners. Do our learners REALLY want to participate in our teaching sessions? How can we know?

In the episode, Ryan and Hannah discuss the differences between assent and consent, how we can inadvertently be coercive even when teaching with positive reinforcement, and how understanding the idea of “degrees of freedom” can help us improve our teaching sessions.

I hope you’ll check out the episode!

You can find it on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, or Spotify, or you can listen directly on the Animal Training Academy website.

Mark your calendars for THIS FRIDAY!!!

ORCA Student Group President and 3rd year MS student Hannah McGee and Jesús Rosales-Ruiz, Ph.D. will be presenting their amazing work on assent at the Behavior Analysis Research Colloquium (BARC) on Friday, October 27th at 3:00 - 5:00PM CST!!

The lecture will be available in person on the UNT campus and via Zoom here: https://unt.zoom.us/my/behavioranalysis

We hope you will be able to join us as Hannah and Jesús discuss their assent work with rats. Assent is a very hot topic in behavior analysis and animal training alike, you won't want to miss what Hannah and Jesús have to say about it!!