Concurrent schedules of positive and negative reinforcement: differential-impact and differential-outcomes hypotheses.
Adding touch, taste, or smell to standard hear-see-say drills helps autistic kids master tacts and intraverbals faster.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team taught six autistic kids new tact and intraverbal words.
They compared two ways: hear-see-say only, or hear-see-touch-taste.
An alternating-treatments design flipped the two ways each day.
Mastery and fluency timings were counted for every word set.
What they found
All kids hit mastery faster when touch, taste, or sniff was added.
They also needed fewer fluency timings before hitting speed goals.
The compound-sensory package clearly beat the audio-visual-only package.
How this fits with other research
Bergmann et al. (2023) saw the same edge for sound-plus-picture over sound-only.
Ruffo et al. (2025) stretched the idea to tactile tacts and still saw faster wins.
Vedora et al. (2015) looked like a contradiction: one toddler learned the same speed with or without extra cues.
The gap fades when you note Joseph’s child was a toddler; younger brains may not yet profit from extra input.
Why it matters
If a child stalls on tacts or intraverbals, bolt on another sense.
Let them feel the cotton ball, taste the lemon, or smell the coffee while you name it.
You may cut sessions and reach mastery days sooner.
Start with one extra modality; if progress still lags, layer in more.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Teaching tact and intraverbal responses based on function-feature-class to children with language delays can result in the emergence of untrained relational responses. The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of compound stimuli in discriminated operants (i.e., different combinations of hear, see, touch, and taste) on the acquisition of object-attribute relations, on the emergence of untrained attribute-object relations, and on the acquisition and emergence of same-different relations between objects and their attributes. All the participants were on the autism spectrum and between 4 and 12 years old. Participants who did not meet the mastery criterion or show emergent intraverbal responses during initial training trials completed a fluency-based practice phase. Overall results showed that all six participants required fewer trials to meet the criterion in the condition involving compound stimuli (e.g., HearSeeSay plus Touch, Taste, or Sniff) as compared to the HearSeeSay-alone condition. In addition, participants required fewer fluency practice timings in the condition involving compound stimuli to meet fluency aim.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2008 · doi:10.1901/jeab.2008.90-1