A comparison of nested and unnested stimuli to teach visual-visual identity matching skills to children with an autism spectrum disorder.

Abstract

Early intensive behavioral intervention programs often use matching-to-sample procedures to teach children with an autism spectrum disorder basic visual-visual identity matching skills. However, teaching matching skills to some children with autism may be challenging when common prompting and reinforcement procedures have failed. The present study manipulated the tactile features of stimuli to increase the discriminability between identical matching objects for three children with autism. An adapted-alternating-treatments design within a concurrent multiple-baselineacross-sets design was used to compare the effectiveness and efficiency of nested versus unnested matching stimuli. Nested stimuli were objects in which the participant could place the identical matching stimulus inside the comparison stimulus when presented in an array, whereas the participant placed the identical unnested matching stimulus next to the comparison stimulus. The overall results showed that participants acquired visual-visual identity matching skills in fewer training sessions when nested targets were used when compared to unnested targets. Findings from this study suggest that manipulating the tactile features of stimuli can facilitate the acquisition of visual-visual identity matching for children with autism spectrum disorder.