Teaching children with autism to discriminate the reinforced and nonreinforced responses of others: Implications for observational learning

We taught 4 participants with autism to discriminate between the reinforced and nonreinforced responses of an adult model and evaluated the effectiveness of this intervention using a multiple baseline design. During baseline, participants were simply exposed to adult models' correct and incorrect responses and the respective consequences of each. During discrimination training, in the presence of target pictures, we taught participants to imitate the reinforced responses of an adult model and to say “I don't know” when an adult model's response was not reinforced. Test sessions were conducted after baseline, discrimination training, and generalization sessions to measure responding to target pictures in the absence of the model, prompts, and reinforcement. All 4 participants showed acquisition in the discrimination of reinforced and nonreinforced responses of the adult model during test sessions. Generalization to stimuli not associated with training was variable across the 4 participants. Implications for teaching observational learning responses to children with autism are discussed.