“…It is fortunate that stimulus overselectivity and blocking may be reduced by teaching an overt precurrent ("observing") response to the S + (Doughty & Hopkins, 2011), as well as by teaching conditional discrimination from the beginning of a procedure, rather than following a simple discrimination (Green, 2001). Moreover, Farber et al (2017) suggested that differential observing responses (e.g., different tacts to sample stimuli) during matching-to-sample resulted in less overselectivity than nondifferential observing responses, where the response to the sample is the same on every trial, in children with autism (e.g., Reed, Altweck, Broomfield, Simpson, & McHugh, 2012). Differential observing responses verify the discrimination of stimulus features that differ among the samples (e.g., by tacting the sample stimuli).…”