Effects of exemplar training in exclusion responding on auditory-visual discrimination tasks with children with autism.
Mix one reinforced known exclusion trial with each new nonreinforced one to slash errors when teaching auditory-visual word links to kids with autism.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Carr (2003) worked with six children with autism who kept failing auditory-visual exclusion tasks.
The kids heard a word like "car" and had to pick the new car picture over three already-known pictures.
The trainer mixed two kinds of trials: some gave praise and a sticker for right picks, others gave nothing for right picks.
What they found
Five of the six children stopped making errors after the mixed-trial training.
They could now hear a new word and pick the new picture on the first try.
The sixth child still needed extra help.
How this fits with other research
Langsdorff et al. (2017) extends this idea to older kids and to children with Down syndrome.
They found the same quick wins for autism kids who had early intervention, but kids without early intervention needed more than two trials to learn each pair.
Breeman et al. (2020) shows why mixing matters: skipping reinforcement or error correction can double the sessions needed to master the same kind of task.
Mahoney et al. (1971) used an auditory cue inside a toileting chain; Deborah flips the cue into a teaching tool for new word-picture links.
Why it matters
You can cut errors in half by giving one reinforced known exclusion trial for every new nonreinforced one.
Start every new auditory-visual program with two quick exclusion probes; if the learner needs more, add the mixed-trial format right away.
Keep reinforcement in the mix—dropping it makes the whole program take twice as long.
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Join Free →Run two probe exclusion trials with each new word; if the child errs, add a reinforced known exclusion trial before every new nonreinforced one.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
In Experiment 1 with 7 autistic children (3 to 6 years old), auditory-visual exclusion was tested with four unknown word-item pairs for each child. One child demonstrated exclusion and positive learning outcomes unequivocally with the four auditory-visual relations. Three children demonstrated exclusion, though inconsistently, and failed to demonstrate positive learning outcomes. The remaining 3 children failed to demonstrate exclusion; therefore, the learning outcome test was omitted. The 6 children who failed to demonstrate exclusion or positive learning outcomes participated in the second experiment. In Experiment 2, nonreinforced exclusion trials with four new unknown word-item pairs were included in trial blocks that also contained reinforced exclusion trials with the unknown exemplars from Experiment 1. Five children demonstrated exclusion with the new word-item pairs, and 4 of these demonstrated positive learning outcomes in further tests. One child demonstrated some limited but inconsistent improvement in exclusion and was not tested for learning outcomes. The data suggest that contemporaneous presentation of multiple examples of reinforced exclusion facilitated nonreinforced exclusion performances and that the resulting reduction in errors was critical in producing accurate learning outcomes with the new word-item discriminations.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 2003 · doi:10.1901/jaba.2003.36-507