Procedural integrity errors have widespread implications for the success or failure of behavior analytic interventions. However, previous research has not examined the effects of procedural integrity errors during auditory-visual conditional discrimination with clinical populations. The purpose of this preliminary investigation was to replicate and extend the work of Carroll, Kodak, and Fisher by evaluating the effects of procedural integrity errors compared with perfect integrity during auditory-visual conditional discrimination training with a child with autism spectrum disorder. A descriptive assessment, which identified omission of reinforcement and omission of error correction as the most common clinician errors, informed error selection. The participant required twice as many sessions to master targets taught under low-integrity conditions compared with those taught under high-integrity conditions. These results suggest that procedural integrity errors hinder skill acquisition and affect teaching efficiency. Future researchers should evaluate the effects of errors during auditory-visual conditional discrimination training across task arrangements.

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One strategy to program for generalization is to vary noncritical features in teaching exemplars, thereby avoiding noncritical features from being highly correlated with reinforcement and thus gaining faulty stimulus control. In the current translational evaluation, 2 groups of adults of typical development were taught to respond to arbitrary stimuli with experimenter‐defined critical and noncritical features in a matching‐to‐sample task. The teaching arrangement used for 1 group programmed for low correlation between noncritical features and reinforcement; the teaching arrangement used for the other group programmed for high correlation between noncritical features and reinforcement. Participants in the former group displayed (a) faster acquisition of matching, (b) less variability in correct responding, and (c) a decreased likelihood of faulty stimulus control developing during training. The results contribute towards advancing the study of stimulus control and developing an explicit technology of generalization to better serve consumers of the application of our science.

The current study examined the efficacy and efficiency of incorporating instructive feedback within matrix training to teach children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to label common characters and cities. Experimenters taught one set of responses using a non-overlapping matrix, a second set of responses using an overlapping matrix, and a third set of responses using a non-overlapping matrix along with secondary targets to three individuals with ASD. The results demonstrated that all teaching methods were effective, and all trained and untrained responses were acquired. Matrix training with instructive feedback was equally as efficient as non-overlapping matrix training and overlapping matrix training, requiring about the same number of sessions for each participant to acquire the responses. The findings demonstrated that establishing recombinative generalization through matrix training and instructive feedback is equally and maybe even more effective and efficient than matrix training in isolation in some circumstances.

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