Training and maintaining a retarded child's proper eating.

The present study was designed to explore whether motivational procedures are needed to maintain a retardate's continued use of previously trained eating skills. A profoundly retarded child who ate food with her hands was trained by a manual guidance procedure to eat properly with a spoon, but the child still did not use the spoon after having learned to do so. When a motivational-maintenance procedure was applied, the child did begin to eat properly. When maintenance was discontinued, the child returned to eating with her hands. Proper eating returned when maintenance was applied again; when discontinued, the child returned to eating with her hands. These results demonstrate that continued motivational procedures are needed after training to maintain the retardate's continued use of proper eating skills.