Effects of within-stimulus and extra-stimulus prompting on discrimination learning in autistic children.
Make the key part of the stimulus pop, don’t add extra cues, when teaching new discriminations to autistic learners.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Cohen (1975) compared two ways to help autistic kids learn new visual discriminations.
One way, called within-stimulus prompting, made the key part of the picture bigger or brighter.
The other way, extra-stimulus prompting, added an arrow or a circle around the picture.
The team ran short alternating sessions with each prompt style plus a no-prompt baseline.
What they found
Kids learned the discrimination only when the critical feature itself was exaggerated.
Extra cues like arrows or circles never produced correct choices.
Without any prompt, performance stayed at chance.
How this fits with other research
Berkowitz (1990) ran a similar alternating-treatments study with communication pictures.
They found that simply waiting a few seconds before giving help—delayed prompting—worked better than slowly removing arrows or colors.
Together the two papers show that less-is-more: either highlight the stimulus itself or wait, but don’t pile on extra cues.
Siu et al. (2011) later showed that making learners click the sample ten times before choosing also sharpens stimulus control in adults, extending the idea that attending to the right part of the stimulus, not extra help, drives learning.
Why it matters
When you teach a new discrimination, first try exaggerating the feature that matters—color, size, or position—then fade that exaggeration. Skip arrows, colored borders, or hand cues; they can become crutches the learner never drops. This small shift can save you trials and cut problem behavior that pops up when prompts confuse rather than clarify.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Two different prompting procedures to teach visual and auditory discriminations to autistic children were compared. The first involved presenting an added cue as an extra-stimulus prompt. This required the child to respond to both prompt and training stimulus. The second involved the use of a within-stimulus prompt. This consisted of an exaggeration of the relevant component of the training stimulus and thus did not require that the child respond to multiple cues. The results indicated that (1) children usually failed to learn the discriminations without a prompt, (2) children always failed to learn when the extra-stimulus prompt was employed but usually did learn with the within-stimulus prompt, and (3) these findings were independent of which modality (auditory or visual) was required for the discrimination.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1975 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1975.8-91