Increasing the saliency of behavior-consequence relations for children with autism who exhibit persistent errors.

Three boys with autism kept picking the wrong picture in match-to-sample tasks.

The team made the right/wrong feedback impossible to miss. They flashed green check marks for hits and red X’s for misses on a big screen. They also thickened the reinforcement schedule so every correct pick earned a toy or snack.

Sessions ran in the child’s usual therapy room. A multiple-baseline design across kids showed when the salience package kicked in.

Errors dropped fast. All three boys jumped from about 30 % correct to 80–90 % correct within nine sessions.

When the team later removed the flashy cues, accuracy stayed high for two of the three kids. The cues alone, not extra drills, broke the error chain.

Farley et al. (2022) lit up spoons with black-light so a boy saw them glow. Like Murphy et al. (2014), they proved that "see the cue better, learn the skill faster" works across different senses.

Jachyra et al. (2021) also boosted salience, but with beeps instead of pictures. Their autistic students remembered future tasks better with loud auditory cues. Together the three studies show salience is a cross-modal lever.

Griffith et al. (2012) used the same multiple-baseline design to teach mands. Both papers reached big gains quickly, so the design itself looks solid for single-case work with kids on the spectrum.

If a learner keeps erring despite clear instructions, don’t just repeat the trial. Pump up the consequence signal. Add color, sound, or thicker reinforcement for a week, then test without it. One quick display tweak may save hours of error correction.