A comparison of teaching tacts with and without background stimuli on acquisition and generality

Abstract

We evaluated whether teaching tacts of images with or without backgrounds would affect acquisition during teaching and generality across untaught targets with four children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Including backgrounds could slow acquisition but bolster generality across other media containing backgrounds, whereas removing backgrounds may improve acquisition but result in poorer generality. Overall, acquisition rates were similar across conditions for three children, although one child displayed consistently slower acquisition during the background condition. We rarely observed generality to untaught targets when programming extinction, but embedding differential reinforcement or teaching additional images with backgrounds led to equally successful outcomes irrespective of initial teaching conditions. Teaching with or without backgrounds may result in marginal differences in acquisition of teaching and untaught targets, especially when arranging supplemental procedures during tests for generality. We discuss the importance of intrasubject replication, considerations when testing for generality, and implications for practice.

Teaching children with autism spectrum disorder to tact auditory stimuli: A replication

“…", "A turkey says…", "Gobble goes the…"). Related to emergence of other responses, we did not assess whether tacts would generalize to real-world stimuli, and future studies should consider including stimulus generalization probes (e.g., Mitteer et al, 2020).…”

“…Then, the experimenter could assess whether these training histories lead to responses under intraverbal control (e.g., “What does a turkey say?”, “Which animal says gobble?”, “A turkey says…”, “Gobble goes the…”). Related to emergence of other responses, we did not assess whether tacts would generalize to real‐world stimuli, and future studies should consider including stimulus generalization probes (e.g., Mitteer et al., 2020).…”

The Use of Instructive Feedback to Promote Emergent Tact and Intraverbal Control: A Replication

“…Nevertheless, we did not see increased correct responding during probes save for Set 1. After discontinuing IF, we included differential reinforcement for correct responses (Mitteer et al, 2020 ). We did this to see whether correct responding increased when responses contacted reinforcement.…”

“…When we did not observe correct responding reach criterion for Sets 2 and 3 after eleven (i.e., 33 sessions) and ten (i.e., 30 sessions) intervention series, respectively, we decided to move from extinction conditions to differential reinforcement (Mitteer et al, 2020 ). If the responses had come under appropriate sources of control, we hypothesized that Clare was not emitting the target responses in probes because they did not contact differential reinforcement and the interspersed trials were highly discriminable.…”

Effects of differential observing responses on observational learning across multiple contingencies

“…Our study is the first to apply a repeated acquisition design to evaluate OL in this manner. Second, like MacDonald and Ahearn (2015), we programmed differential reinforcement during response opportunities, which may have prevented response-reinforcer disruptions that could occur with extinction and maintain any stimulus control established during observation opportunities; see the effects of extinction in Delgado and Greer (2009) and possible solutions to attenuating the effects of programming extinction for testing generalization discussed by Mitteer et al (2020). Most researchers, however, have tested OL under extinction in response opportunities to rule out differential reinforcement as a threat to internal validity for improvements in OL (Delgado & Greer, 2009;DeQuinzio & Taylor, 2015;DeQuinzio et al, 2018;.…”