Nesrhtens…..

Sometimes children with autism are reluctant to respond to discriminative stimuli or task during discrete trail teaching. This is of course a problem that can be due to a number of reasons. All from not having potential reinforcers to the tasks been too complex or difficult. This often easy to correct in the environment the children are receiving training. But for some children the problems seems to be that concurrent and competing schedules of reinforcement, as best described in Catania, is the challenge the behavior analyst has to deal with.

Some children has a history of reinforcement with not responding, and this schedule compete with stimuli serving as reinforcers in other settings, or was selected during preference assessment. This of course can´t be said to be a reinforcer during DTT, but as for some of the children none seems to be. This poses a great challenge for the therapists or teachers. First of all it´s often difficult to assess in a natural environment. To assess this challenge to an extent that can lead to effective intervention on often has to perform a functional analysis in a controlled environment; something many therapist and children do not have access to.

The results of the functional analysis may also bee difficult to interpret and translate into effective practices. And when one succeed in developing effective intervention this often requires extreme knowledge of behavior analysis and trainer skills. My experience is therefore that this problem often are solved by implementing prompting procedures that serve as an aversive stimuli, and the child learn the skills under negative reinforcement. This will of course often establish the skills, but also increase other avoidance behavior, often make the child passive and create several ethical concerns.

So a task for practitioners and researchers should be to investigate time-efficient and simple enough procedures to assess those cases of concurrent and competing schedules of reinforcement for non-responding and responding in Discrete Trail Teaching

Related posts:

1. Using Lag Schedule Reinforcement Schedules to Increase Vocal Variability in Children with Autism
2. Condition for social stimuli as reinforcers for children with autism
3. Derived relational responding and EIBI