No abstract

The present study evaluated the efficacy of a stimulus-equivalence training procedure in teaching basic geography skills to two children with autism. The procedures were taken directly from a standardized training curriculum based in stimulus equivalence theory called Promoting the Emergence of Advanced Knowledge Equivalence Module (PEAK-E). Results suggest that the procedures were efficacious in directly training several geographical relations, as well as promoting the derivation of several untrained relations for three countries and their corresponding continents. In addition, responding generalized from selecting countries on a tabletop paper map to selecting countries on an interactive touchscreen map.

This study evaluated the effectiveness of the AIM curriculum when implemented in a public-school setting by schoolteachers and direct care staff. Three hundred eighteen students took part in this quasiexperimental design where all received the AIM curriculum every day for an entire school year. The participants completed a series of self-assessments (the Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire for Youth, the Child and Adolescent Mindfulness Measure, and the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire) at the onset of the study and at the end of the school year to assess psychological flexibility, mindfulness, and emotional behavioral skills. Results suggest that at the end of the school year, participants increased psychological flexibility and mindfulness. State standardized testing scores also showed increases school-wide as compared to the previous 2 years. These results suggest that the AIM curriculum may be effective in large school settings, appeared easy to implement by school staff to address the needs of both the individual student and the entire student body, and likely participated in improving school-wide academic success.

Many children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder have difficulties identifying and labeling emotions of others. Three adolescent males all diagnosed with ASD participated in the study. In a multi-element design, the participants were trained to tact private events of others in context using novel video-based scenarios. Two of the three participants were able to increase and maintain their responding for all trained, derived, and transformation of stimulus function relations. The third participant required multiple-exemplar training of novel stimuli to increase his responding for all the video-based scenarios. The results of the study support the utility of relational training for teaching children with autism to identify private events of others in context.

Relational Frame Theory posits that complex language develops through arbitrarily applicable relational networks, with potential implications for individuals with autism. Responding relationally based on comparison occurs when participants respond to any number of comparative properties, such as “bigger” or “faster.” Experiment 1 established two 3‐member comparative networks, in which a stimulus A was conditioned as “bigger” or “faster” than a stimulus B, and the stimulus B was conditioned as “bigger” or “faster” than a stimulus C in 2 children with autism. Both participants met the mastery criterion for the trained relations and demonstrated the emergence of the untrained combinatorially entailed A–C and C–A relations. The participants could also match the arbitrary A stimuli with larger or faster objects and the C stimuli with smaller or slower objects. The results were replicated in Experiment 2 with the same participants, where a 5‐member relational network was established for the bigger/smaller relation.