Teaching children with autism to respond to disguised mands
A quick BST loop teaches kids with autism to read and act on hidden requests like "It's cold in here."
01Research in Context
What this study did
Three boys with autism practiced hidden requests.
The team used a short BST package: rules, role-play, feedback.
They tested if the kids could answer disguised mands like "It's cold in here" by closing the window.
What they found
All three boys learned to act on the hidden request.
The skill spread to new disguised mands and new adults.
How this fits with other research
Welsh et al. (2019) took the same MET package into grocery stores and parks.
They taught kids to say what others see or hear, extending the 2017 work to community settings.
St. Clair et al. (2024) used the same brief BST to teach playful tricks.
Kids learned friendly deception and generalized to new jokes, showing the package works for both helpful and playful hidden intent.
Ladouceur et al. (1997) looks opposite at first: they shaped trickery with simple reinforcement, no rules or role-play.
The older study targeted a game, not daily social cues, so both papers fit together like puzzle pieces.
Why it matters
You can add a 20-minute rules-role-play-feedback loop to your plan this week.
Pick one disguised mand your client hears daily, practice three examples, give feedback, then test with a novel adult.
The same package also sets up perspective-taking and playful social skills later.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulty inferring the private events of others, including private verbal behavior (e.g., thoughts), private emotional responses, and private establishing operations, often referred to as "perspective taking" by the general psychology community. Children with ASD also have difficulty responding to disguised mands. Skinner's description of the "disguised mand" is verbal behavior wherein the speaker's mand directly describes neither its reinforcer nor the corresponding establishing operations. Appropriate responding to disguised mands is required for successful social interaction, making it a social skill worth teaching to children with ASD. We used a nonconcurrent multiple baseline across participants design to investigate the effects of a multiple exemplar training package consisting of rules, role play, and feedback for teaching three boys with ASD to respond to disguised mands. The intervention was effective and generalization to novel disguised mands and people was observed.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2017 · doi:10.1002/jaba.413