Effects of exemplar training in exclusion responding on auditory-visual discrimination tasks with children with autism

Abstract

In Experiment 1 with 7 autistic children (3 to 6 years old), auditory-visual exclusion was tested with four unknown word-item pairs for each child. One child demonstrated exclusion and positive learning outcomes unequivocally with the four auditory-visual relations. Three children demonstrated exclusion, though inconsistently, and failed to demonstrate positive learning outcomes. The remaining 3 children failed to demonstrate exclusion; therefore, the learning outcome test was omitted. The 6 children who failed to demonstrate exclusion or positive learning outcomes participated in the second experiment. In Experiment 2, nonreinforced exclusion trials with four new unknown word-item pairs were included in trial blocks that also contained reinforced exclusion trials with the unknown exemplars from Experiment 1. Five children demonstrated exclusion with the new word-item pairs, and 4 of these demonstrated positive learning outcomes in further tests. One child demonstrated some limited but inconsistent improvement in exclusion and was not tested for learning outcomes. The data suggest that contemporaneous presentation of multiple examples of reinforced exclusion facilitated nonreinforced exclusion performances and that the resulting reduction in errors was critical in producing accurate learning outcomes with the new word-item discriminations.