Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are taught conditional discriminations often during early intervention. Auditory-visual conditional discrimination (AVCD) training requires the presentation of multiple antecedent stimuli, and the order of stimulus presentation varies in the literature. This series of studies replicated previous…

Auditory-visual conditional discrimination training (e.g., receptive identification training, listener responses; AVCD) is ubiquitous in early intervention and special education programs. Nevertheless, some learners with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) do not appear to benefit from this training despite use of empirically validated treatments. To…

Children with autism spectrum disorder are typically taught conditional discriminations using a match-to-sample arrangement. Consideration should be given to the temporal order in which antecedent stimuli (the sample and comparison stimuli) are presented during match-to-sample trials, as various arrangements have been used in the extant…

Few studies have evaluated the use of assessment to identify the most efficient instructional practices for individuals with autism spectrum disorder. This is problematic as these individuals often have difficulty acquiring skills, and the procedures that may be efficient with one individual may not be for others. The experimenters conducted…

Children who are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often fail to show equivalence class formation. This may be related to their difficulty in learning the programmed baseline conditional discriminations. The present study investigated equivalence class formation after training visual identity-matching performance with auditory…

In teaching conditional discriminations to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), practitioners may progress from simple to conditional discriminations or may teach conditional discriminations from the onset of instruction. Some research indicates that teaching simple discriminations first may be unnecessary and that teaching may more…

The current investigation evaluated repertoires that may be related to performance on auditory-to-visual conditional discrimination training with 9 students who had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. The skills included in the assessment were matching, imitation, scanning, an auditory discrimination, and a visual discrimination. The…

The purpose of the present investigation was to evaluate a rapid assessment procedure to identify effective instructional strategies to teach auditory-visual conditional discriminations to children diagnosed with autism. We replicated and extended previous rapid skills assessments (Lerman, Vorndran, Addison, & Kuhn, 2004) by evaluating the effects…

The Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities (ABLA) was developed to assess the ease or difficulty with which individuals with intellectual disabilities are able to learn an imitation task and five 2-choice discriminations, called levels. Level 6 is an auditory-visual discrimination. We examined whether children with autism who passed ABLA Level 6…

This study was a systematic replication and extension of Fisher, Kodak, and Moore (2007), in which a picture prompt embedded into a least-to-most prompting sequence facilitated acquisition of auditory-visual conditional discriminations. Participants were 4 children who had been diagnosed with autism; 2 had limited prior receptive skills, and 2 had…

Many early intervention curricular manuals recommend teaching auditory-visual conditional discriminations (i.e., receptive labeling) using the simple-conditional method in which component simple discriminations are taught in isolation and in the presence of a distracter stimulus before the learner is required to respond conditionally. Some have…

We examined the relationship between three discrimination skills (visual, visual matching-to-sample, and auditory-visual) and four stimulus modalities (object, picture, spoken, and video) in assessing preferences of leisure activities for 7 adults with developmental disabilities. Three discrimination skills were measured using the Assessment of…

After computerized training on visual-visual identity matching, a 5-year old with autism was given visual-visual and auditory-visual matching-to-sample tests with new stimuli. He performed poorly on matching visual stimuli until the stimulus array was changed to resemble the computer-stimulus arrangement, indicating the influence of small…

Following a review of the literature on responses of autistic persons to environmental stimulation, three experiments are detailed which examine the relationship between modality preference and rate of acquisition of a discrimination task. First, seven autistic children's preference for colored lights and/or simple tones was assessed in a sensory…

We propose an "Enhanced Perceptual Functioning" model encompassing the main differences between autistic and non-autistic social and non-social perceptual processing: locally oriented visual and auditory perception, enhanced low-level discrimination, use of a more posterior network in "complex" visual tasks, enhanced perception…