Richard W. Serna

Complex Stimulus Control and Equivalence

A matching-to-sample procedure that engenders observation of two elements of a complex sample stimulus may establish equivalence relations among those elements. Studies that focus on complex stimulus control will help determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for equivalence class formation. Further studies in this area will benefit by blending the methods and concepts of stimulus equivalence research with those used in studies of conceptually related learning processes. The enterprise may also profit by reconsidering the role of compound stimulus control in the formation of equivalence.

Assessing same/different judgments in individuals with severe intellectual disabilities: A status report☆

This report summarizes state-of-the-art approaches for assessing visual stimulus same/different judgments in individuals with severe intellectual disabilities. Methods are described that permit one to conduct assessments on a population-wide basis, excluding few if any participants due to failure to acquire necessary baseline performances. Methodological investigations summarized here indicate that one can obtain reliable same/different judgments with a variety of stimuli in virtually anyone for whom a basal score on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test can be obtained. This approach includes judgments involving not only familiar, readily nameable stimuli, but also abstract two-dimensional forms of the type commonly used to minimize extraexperimental influences on performance. Taken together, recent findings lead to the conclusion that past studies have significantly under-estimated the capacity of participants with low MA scores to make same/different judgments. They also suggest a more general methodological approach that can potentially lead to more sensitive assessment of other behavioral capacities in this difficult-to-test population.

Extending the Reach of Early Intervention Training for Practitioners: A Preliminary Investigation of an Online Curriculum for Teaching Behavioral Intervention Knowledge in Autism to Families and Service Providers

Early behavioral intervention (BI), based on the methods of applied behavior analysis, has the strongest and most consistent scientific support as a means of teaching skills to young children with autism spectrum disorder and reducing their restricted and maladaptive behavior. Although individual applied behavior analysis (ABA)-based treatment plans are usually developed, designed, and supervised by a senior-level clinician, they are most often implemented by a practitioner, such as a parent, direct service provider, aide, or an early childhood professional from a related discipline. Unfortunately, few practitioner-orientated training programs are available to geographically disparate persons. Online distance-learning education offers a potential solution to this problem. Fifty-one individuals participated in an initial study of a short, 3-module online course. The results showed a highly statistically significant difference between the mean pretest and posttest scores. The outcomes suggest the feasibility and user satisfaction of teaching BI knowledge acquisition online and thus bolster confidence that future, larger-scale curricula aimed at teaching BI in a distance-learning format is warranted.

Re-evaluation of a Programmed Method To Teach Generalized Identity Matching to Sample.

Programmed training in identity matching to sample was given to six participants who had severe mental retardation, mental age-equivalent scores of 3.0 years or less, and histories of failures in prior assessments and training attempts with standard procedures. An intermediate goal of the training program was to establish one-trial discrimination learning (OTDL), where new discriminations are acquired after a single training trial, OTDL was included because an analysis of the task requirements for identity matching suggested that it could be a prerequisite skill. One participant was eliminated from the experiment when stimulus control by prompting procedures broke down relatively early in training. Only one of the remaining participants achieved OTDL. When the program was modified to eliminate OTDL as an intermediate goal, for participants completed it and passed tests for generalized identity matching with high accuracy scores. The program was partially successful with the sixth participant in that it established highly accurate and reliable identity matching when different stimuli were displayed on every trial (nonconditional-function matching), but not when the same set of comparison stimuli was displayed on every trial (conditional-function matching). The results showed that (a) one-trial discrimination learning appears to be sufficient but not necessary for identify matching, and (b) the program successfully established identity matching in a majority of difficult-to-teach students who had well-documented failures to learn by standard teaching methods.

Are Robots Ready to Deliver Autism Interventions? A Comprehensive Review

This article presents a review of the contemporary robotics research with respect to making robots and human–robot interaction (HRI) useful for autism intervention in clinical settings. Robotics research over the past decade has demonstrated that many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have a strong interest in robots and robot toys and can connect with a robot significantly better than with a human. Despite showing great promise, research in this direction has made minimal progress in advancing robots as clinically useful for ASD intervention. Moreover, the clinicians are generally not convinced about the potential of robots. A major reason behind this is that a vast majority of HRI studies on robot-mediated intervention (RMI) do not follow any standard research design and, consequently, the data produced by these studies is minimally appealing to the clinical community. In clinical research on ASD intervention, a systematic evaluation of the evidence found from a study is performed to determine the effectiveness of an experimental intervention (e.g., a RMI). An intervention that produces a stable positive effect is considered as an evidence-based practice (EBP) in autism. EBPs enable clinicians to choose the best available treatments for an individual with ASD. The ultimate goal of RMI, therefore, is to be considered as an EBP so that they can actually be used for treating autism. There are several criteria to measure the strength of evidence, and they are mostly geared toward rigorous research design. The research on RMI, therefore, needs to follow standard research design to be acceptable by the clinical community. This paper reviews the contemporary literature on robotics and autism to understand the status of RMI with respect to being an EBP in autism treatment. First, a set of guidelines is reported which is considered as a benchmark for research design in clinical research on ASD intervention and can easily be adopted in HRI studies on RMI. The existing literature on RMI is then reviewed with respect to these guidelines. We hope that the guidelines reported in this paper will help the robotics community to design user studies on RMI that meet clinical standards and thereby produce results that can lead RMI toward being considered as an EBP in autism. Note that the paper is exclusively focused on the role of robots in ASD intervention/therapy. Reviews on the use of robots in ASD diagnosis are beyond the scope of this paper.

Measuring the Efficacy of Robots in Autism Therapy: How Informative are Standard HRI Metrics'

A significant amount of robotics research over the past decade has shown that many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have a strong interest in robots and robot toys, concluding that robots are potential tools for the therapy of individuals with ASD. However, clinicians, who have the authority to approve robots in ASD therapy, are not convinced about the potential of robots. One major reason is that the research in this domain does not have a strong focus on the efficacy of robots. Robots in ASD therapy are end-user oriented technologies, the success of which depends on their demonstrated efficacy in real settings. This paper focuses on measuring the efficacy of robots in ASD therapy and, based on the data from a feasibility study, shows that the human-robot interaction (HRI) metrics commonly used in this research domain might not be sufficient. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.4 [Systems and Software]: [Performance evaluation (efficiency and effectiveness)]; J.4 [Social and Behavioral Sciences]: [Psychology]

Developing Auditory Stimulus Control: A Note on Methodology

This paper concerns the problem of teaching people with intellectual handicaps to respond reliably to spoken words and other auditory instructional stimuli. We describe how microcomputer technology can be applied to implement effective auditory stimulus control shaping methods. With hardware and software currently available, it is now possible to adapt procedures that have been previously successful in stimulus control programming with visual stimuli. We describe several techniques for programming gradual stimulus changes (e.g., stimulus fading, stimulus shaping) to promote auditory discrimination learning. Teaching studies with two individuals with severe mental retardation provide illustrative applications and data supporting the feasibility and potential utility of auditory stimulus control shaping methodology.

Innovations in Behavioral Intervention Preparation for Paraprofessionals Working with Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Given the empirically validated success of behavioral intervention based on applied behavior analysis for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other developmental disabilities, the demand for knowledgeable and skilled paraprofessional teaching staff is very high. Unfortunately, there currently exists a widely recognized shortage of such practitioners. This article describes the development of an online training program aimed at preparing paraprofessionals for face-to-face training and supervision as part of a solution to the growing demand. The focus of the program has been on moving beyond traditional online pedagogy, which has limited interactivity. Instead, the approach to teaching fundamental knowledge and implementation skills in behavioral intervention methods incorporates first-person simulations, typical of live mentor/mentee training. Preliminary program evaluation data are also described.

Response-force manipulations in fixed-ratio schedules

Response force (effort) was manipulated by varying the required travel of a pigeon’s pecking key. Performances under a fixed-ratio 2 schedule and a fixed-ratio 20 schedule were compared at the different forces. Results indicated that increasing the force requirement produced a lower overall response rate through a lengthening of the preratio pause; at fixed ratio 2t the inter-response times were also lengthened slightly, but not at fixed ratio 20.

A Note on Stimulus Control Shaping and One-Trial Learning in Two- and Three-Year-Old Children

Fifty-nine children were exposed to one of three discrimination training procedures that might teach them to discriminate a circle from an ellipse. One procedure was an extensively studied, well-validated stimulus control shaping program that used intensity fading procedures. The other two procedures used no fading and relied primarily on simple differential reinforcement of the final performance. The stimulus control shaping program established the circle-ellipse discrimination in 18 of 19 subjects with few or no errors, thus replicating previous research. An unexpected finding was the high success rate of the other two procedures. The circle-ellipse discrimination was established in 36 of 40 subjects. Many of these subjects also learned with few or no errors. In general, the findings demonstrate that extremely rapid (even one-trial) discrimination learning is achievable with very young children without stimulus control shaping. The findings also point to variables that may be important in analysis of learning that occurs in the course of the circle-ellipse stimulus control shaping program.