Establishing Multiple-Control Responding of Children with Autism to People and Emotions in Context by Utilizing Derived Stimulus Relations

O’Connor et al. (2020) worked with three children with autism. They wanted to see if the kids could learn to match people with emotions and places without direct teaching.

The team used stimulus-equivalence training. They first taught simple matches like “Mom-happy-park.” Then they tested if the children could pick “Mom” when they only saw “happy” and “park” without ever being taught that exact trio.

All three kids mastered the trained links. Two of them immediately derived the new, untaught matches. The third child needed a quick correction program, then he got it too.

In plain words, the children could now look at a picture of a smiling face and point to the right person and place, even though that exact combination had never been drilled.

Fienup et al. (2017) showed that adults without autism also form these derived links, but only when the mastery rule is set to 12 correct trials in a row. O’Connor moves the same logic down to young children with autism and keeps the tight criterion, proving the method still works.

Dixon et al. (2018) used the PEAK curriculum to build similar derived language skills in adults with autism. O’Connor shortens the path: a brief equivalence protocol gives comparable gains in kids, so you don’t need a full curriculum for every goal.

Gwynette et al. (2020) got emergent verbal responses by slipping extra facts into mastered tasks. O’Connor gets emergent responses too, but through equivalence networks instead of instructive feedback. Both studies say the same thing: kids can learn more than you directly teach if you set the learning context right.

You can fold this protocol into social-skills or emotion-recognition programs. After a child masters “happy-Mom” and “Mom-park,” test if they can pick Mom when you just say “happy” and show the park. If they can’t, run a quick correction trial and test again. The whole package takes about an hour and gives you untaught, context-bound emotion responses that typical drills often miss.