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…

Stimulus overselectivity is widely accepted as a stimulus control abnormality in autism spectrum disorders and subsets of other populations. Previous research has demonstrated a link between both chronological and mental age and overselectivity in typical development. However, the age at which children are developmentally ready to respond to…

In Experiment 1, "more" and "less" relations were trained for arbitrary Stimuli A1 and A2 with 3 children with autism. The following conditional discriminations were then trained: A1-B1, A2-B2, B1-C1, B2-C2. In subsequent tests, participants showed derived more-less mands (mand with C1 for more and mand with C2 for less). A training procedure…

Many everyday matching tasks taught to persons with developmental disabilities are visual-visual non-identity matching (VVNM) tasks, such as matching the printed word DOG to a picture of a dog, or matching a sock to a shoe. Research has shown that, for participants who have failed a VVNM prototype task, it is very difficult to teach them various…