Section: Research

Brent Jones, Ph.D.,BCBA

Academic Role: Instructor

Faculty Appointment(s) In:
   Psychiatry

Other Affiliation(s):
   Shriver Center

Research Interests

Dr. Jones's research involves a behavior-analytic approach to studying discrimination learning in individuals who have moderate to severe developmental disabilities such as mental retardation, Down’s syndrome and Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). His work examines fundamental issues in the development and maintenance of stimulus control in a range of tasks requiring simple, conditional, simultaneous and/or successive discriminations between stimuli. Of particular recent interest has been mathematical modeling of interactive effects of reinforcement and stimulus parameters on stable-state performance of matching-to-sample tasks, and the stimulus control of observing behavior (i.e., attention) and of choice responding in those tasks. The overall aim of his research is to design more effective and more efficient methods of teaching to intellectually-disabled people some of those discriminations that typically-developing children seem to learn incidentally and as a result of being proficient members of a verbal community. By better understanding the conditions that support learning to either discriminate stimuli or treat them as equivalent, empirically-validated instructional methods can be developed.

Office: CERC Bldg.
Phone: 781-642-0254
E-mail: BM.Jones@umassmed.edu

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