Using conditional discrimination training to produce emergent relations between coins and their values in children with autism.

The team taught two preschoolers with autism to match coins to their values.

They used conditional discrimination training. Kids learned to pick the right coin when they heard the value spoken aloud.

Sessions were short and used simple praise for correct picks.

Both children mastered the trained coin-value pairs quickly.

More important, each child then picked the correct coin for values that had never been taught. They showed 4–7 new relations without extra training.

This emergent performance is the hallmark of stimulus equivalence.

Lin et al. (2020) repeated the same conditional-only logic with Chinese preschoolers who had autism. Instead of coins, kids matched sounds to pictures. Their positive results confirm the method travels across cultures and stimuli.

Yuan et al. (2023) built on Lin’s work and compared conditional-only against a mixed simple-to-conditional sequence. Again, conditional-only won: fewer sessions to mastery. Together these two papers strengthen the case for starting directly with conditional tasks.

DeQuinzio et al. (2018) used discrimination training plus observational learning. Their children learned to copy only correct models and say “I don’t know” when models were wrong. The core procedure is cousin to S et al., but the goal was learning from others, not money skills.

You can teach money concepts faster than you think. Train the basic coin-value relations; the kids will give you several untrained matches for free. Skip long pre-training and jump straight into conditional tasks—three labs now show this saves time. Next time you run a community skills program, start with conditional discrimination on real coins and watch the extra relations appear without extra work.