Teaching children with autism to discriminate the reinforced and nonreinforced responses of others: implications for observational learning.
Show kids with autism which models get rewarded and they quickly learn who to copy.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Four children with autism watched adults do tasks. Some adult moves earned praise. Other moves got nothing.
The kids then had to pick which moves were worth copying. The team used short trials and tracked how choices changed.
What they found
Every child learned to tell the winning moves from the duds. When tested with new tasks, some kids still chose well and some did not.
How this fits with other research
MacDonald et al. (2015) taught the same skill with a wider plan. They gave many examples across toys and games. Their kids kept the skill in new places more often.
The two studies do not clash. DeQuinzio et al. (2015) used one clear rule: watch for praise. MacDonald et al. (2015) added lots of examples. The second plan simply builds on the first.
Levesque-Wolfe et al. (2021) used the same teach-for-discrimination idea for safety. Their kids learned to leave only with safe adults. Again, the method repeats with new content.
Why it matters
Your learner may copy everything they see. Start by showing one model get praise and another get nothing. Ask, “Who should you copy?” Once they pick the praised model every time, add new tasks and new people. This quick step stops wasted trials and builds smart observers.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We taught 4 participants with autism to discriminate between the reinforced and nonreinforced responses of an adult model and evaluated the effectiveness of this intervention using a multiple baseline design. During baseline, participants were simply exposed to adult models' correct and incorrect responses and the respective consequences of each. During discrimination training, in the presence of target pictures, we taught participants to imitate the reinforced responses of an adult model and to say "I don't know" when an adult model's response was not reinforced. Test sessions were conducted after baseline, discrimination training, and generalization sessions to measure responding to target pictures in the absence of the model, prompts, and reinforcement. All 4 participants showed acquisition in the discrimination of reinforced and nonreinforced responses of the adult model during test sessions. Generalization to stimuli not associated with training was variable across the 4 participants. Implications for teaching observational learning responses to children with autism are discussed.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 2015 · doi:10.1002/jaba.192