Go/no‐go procedure with compound stimuli with children with autism

Ribeiro et al. (2017) used a go/no-go game with two children with autism. The kids saw picture pairs on a screen. They learned to press for some pairs and to hold still for others.

The pictures were compound stimuli: each pair had two cues at once. After the kids mastered the trained pairs, the team tested if they could flip the pairs around (symmetry) and mix them into new sets (equivalence).

Both children learned the trained pairs and passed the symmetry test. When the pictures were reversed, they still knew what to do.

Equivalence did not show up. New mixed pairs did not make sense to them without more teaching.

Brayner de Freitas Gueiros et al. (2020) ran the same go/no-go game with typically developing preschoolers. Those kids built even more: they gained emergent reading skills after training. The autism group stopped at symmetry, while the neurotypical group kept going to equivalence and beyond.

Bailey et al. (2010) also taught two-choice tasks to children with autism, but they used no-no prompting instead of go/no-go. Their kids reached mastery too, showing that different roads can lead to the same first step.

McGeown et al. (2013) remind us that kids under three often struggle with many cues at once. The autism learners in Silva’s study were older, yet equivalence still lagged, hinting that the hurdle is not just age.

Go/no-go with compound stimuli is a quick way to lock in conditional discriminations for kids with autism, but do not assume full equivalence will follow. Plan extra steps if you need emergent relations. Probe symmetry early as a confidence check, then add explicit equivalence trials or use different protocols if the goal is transfer to new sets.