Association for Behavior Analysis International

This symposium includes four papers describing recent advances in skill acquisition research with children with autism. The first paper evaluated the effectiveness of a multiple exemplar training package to establish a generalized repertoire of predicting the cause of others' emotions. The second paper evaluated the use of self-monitoring in the reduction of multiple stereotypic motor behaviors using a multiple baseline across behaviors experimental design with two children. The third paper evaluated a multiple exemplar training package to teach children to respond to disguised mands. The fourth paper evaluated the use of a percentile schedule of reinforcement to teach appropriate waiting skills. The symposium will conclude with a discussion by Dr. Amanda Adams from California State University, Fresno.

Numerous studies on perspective taking have suggested that children with autism are distinctively deficit in understanding that others' perspectives are different from their own. These studies often suggest that children with autism may be unable to learn to take another's perspective, but current research in the field of applied behavior analysis suggests otherwise. The current study evaluated a behavioral teaching procedure in one area of perspective taking: inferring and predicting others' emotions based on met or unmet desires. The procedure included a multicomponent training package using multiple exemplar training across scenarios in which three children with autism were asked to predict how others may feel given a met or unmet desire or non-desire and why others may feel this way. Results were analyzed using a multiple baseline across participants design and suggest that the multiple exemplar training package was effective for teaching the prediction of others' desire-based emotions and generalization was observed across novel exemplars.

This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a self-monitoring intervention on the reduction of stereotypic behaviors in children with autism. Research has shown that stereotypic behaviors are maladaptive and can have negative effects on social interactions. Previous research has indicated that self-monitoring may be an effective intervention for decreasing these behaviors but most previous research has used multiple treatment components (e.g., differential reinforcement, rules, etc.) and little is known about the efficacy of self-monitoring in the absence of other treatment components. The present study involved teaching self-monitoring techniques in a home setting to identify if self-monitoring alone would result in a reduction of stereotypic behaviors without other treatment components. The results of the study suggest that the self-monitoring component was effective in decreasing stereotypic behaviors. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Skinner's concept of the "disguised mand" is a verbal response, wherein the speaker's mand does not directly describe its reinforcer. Children with autism often have difficulty with detecting and reinforcing disguised mands. Given that a high number of mands in every day interactions consist of disguised mands, it is important to teach children with ASD to detect these and respond appropriately. The purpose of this study was to determine if multiple exemplar training and the use of rules, role playing, and feedback could teach children with autism to detect and respond appropriately to disguised mands. The results indicated that the procedure effectively taught participants to detect and respond appropriately to disguised mands. Additionally, generalization was demonstrated to novel, untrained disguised mands and to other people who were not involved in training.

Despite the social importance of teaching young children with autism to withstand a delay to reinforcement, little research has been conducted to determine how to teach this skill in applied settings. As such, a procedure was developed to examine how a percentile schedule of reinforcement may be used to teach young children with autism to wait appropriately for preferred edible items. All participants experienced a contingency-only phase where the edible item was presented following a wait duration that met the reinforcement criteria as determined by the percentile schedule, a phase that introduced the use of corrective feedback for those wait durations that did not meet the reinforcement criteria, and, finally, the addition of social praise statements that accompanied the delivery of the edible reinforcer. Two types of generalization probes, one conducted by the participants' parents and the other using preferred leisure activities, and one-month maintenance probes were also conducted. Results and suggestions for future research will be discussed.