I’ve been out of town for most of the past week in Washington, D.C. for the annual convention for the Association for Behavior Analysis, International. This year was ABAI’s 51st annual convention!
Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz and I gave a workshop on Friday as part of the pre-convention program.
We had a great group of workshop attendees, and we spent the day talking about how PORTL can be used as a teaching tool in university classrooms, for staff training, and for research. (What is PORTL?)
Then, I spent three full days attending conference presentations during the day and staying up late in the evenings discussing the presentations with friends.
Most attendees at the ABAI conference are not animal trainers.
Many are behavior analysts who work with children in school or clinical settings. Others work in the areas of organizational behavior management, staff training, neuroscience, health and fitness, sustainability, and many other domains!
It’s always interesting to listen to presentations from others who are knowledgable about behavior, but who work in areas completely different from what I do. A lecture topic that might seem completely unrelated to animal training often gives me a new perspective to think about or ideas for how to teach a behavior in a different way.
This year, I saw presentations about the behavior of bees, basic research on resurgence, facilitated communication (and other related pseudoscience technology), trauma-informed care, assent, stimulus control, measuring human-animal interactions, and much more!
I’m currently playing catch up with lots of work, after being gone for a week. However, I’ll try to share a few notes from the conference in June.
Chewie got to hang out with her pals at the barn while I was gone, and she certainly seemed happy to see me when I returned!
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