No abstract

No 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.

No abstract

We observed three children with autism spectrum disorder during structured play dates in which play partners displayed interest or disinterest in the toys with which they were playing. We then taught subjects to identify play partners' preferences and to make appropriate toy offers using a multiple-exemplar training package consisting of rules, midplay preference questions, prompting, and praise with observed generalization across untrained partners.