The Experimental Analysis of Behaviour Group (EABG) – 2017 meeting

Abstract

The Experimental Analysis of Behavior Group hosted its biennial conference at University College London from the 10 to the 12 of April 2017. The conference grew in both size and reach from previous years, with the 2017 meeting attended by more than 400 delegates from all over the world (the UK, Europe, and further afield). The event was attended by a range of practitioners, researchers, students, and other key stakeholders such as parents and speech language therapists. Following the inaugural Professor Fergus Lowe Memorial Keynote Address in 2015, the keynote address in 2017 was delivered by Dr Anthony Biglan, a Senior Scientist at the Oregon Research Institute, the Co-Director of the Promise Neighborhood Research Consortium, and the author of the book The Nurture Effect. We were also fortunate to host two talks by invited speakers. Dr Corinna Grindle (Bangor University, Positive Behavioural Solutions) gave the first Sharland Foundation, SF-DDARIN Invited Talk on using behavior analysis to teach reading, maths and writing to children with autism. Dr Jennifer Austin (University of South Wales) presented on behavior-analytic assessments and interventions with typically developing children within schools. In addition to the invited talks, we hosted Manny Rodriguez, Daniel Sundberg, and Shannon Biagi, USbased leaders in the field of organizational behavior management (OBM) who gave a specialized tutorial invited by the UK Society for Behavior Analysis OBM Special Interest Group. There were 24 events, including symposia, poster sessions, invited addresses, and workshops. The diversity of the events showed the breadth of behavior analysis in Europe, and EABG’s strong ties to international behavior analysis. There were presentations of both applied and basic work that addressed a variety of subfields and applications (e.g., the experimental analysis of behavior applied to people with dementia, people with developmental disabilities, children and adults). There were symposia addressing equivalence learning, ethical issues in clinical practice, Relational Frame Theory, school-based interventions, and positive behavior support. The current issue contains two papers based on presentations given at the EABG 2017 conference. Hansen and Arntzen (2018) demonstrated that eye movements can be a useful measure of performance in conditional discrimination tasks, and that different training structures were differentially effective in teaching conditional discriminations. Brogård-Antonsen and Arntzen (2020) showed that older participants performed more