Project Results

These studies provided further support for the contention made by RFT that DRR is a learned operant, and provided important evidence of the effectiveness of MET in establishing repertoires of DRR with individuals who have limited language skills.  In addition to the theoretical implications of the work, there were also significant practical implications. In both lines of research, new methods for assessing and training early repertoires of DRR were developed that can easily be implemented by practitioners in the course of typical early intervention programs, either in tabletop formats or in an easily managed iPad app.

About This Project

Children with autism often display rote, rigid conversational skills. A critical question is how to teach children to understand sentences they've never heard before and speak in ways they've never been taught—how to teach them to participate in the ever-changing flow of typical conversation. These projects will focus on teaching core skills that form the foundation of more flexible, generative language.

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What is the context of this research?

Relational Frame Theory is a relatively new behavioral account of language and cognition that describes the process of learning language as learning relational patterns of responding. For example, if you know that Sue is in the same class as Bob, and Bob is in the same class as Joe, then you can also deduce that Sue and Joe are in the same class. This is one type of relational pattern—sameness. Another relational pattern is difference: if Amy and Ted are in different classes, and Ted and Alice are in the same class, then Amy is in a different class from Alice. Others are comparative, spatial, hierarchical patterns, and so on.

While these seem like basic skills, many children with autism are unable to "figure out" an untaught relation on the basis of the taught ones. How can we teach this?

What is the significance of this project?

There is beginning to be evidence that if you provide training on many examples of the pattern of responding, children will learn how to respond to the pattern, rather than to only the specific taught information or stimuli. This ability to "figure out" the connections between new stimuli (words, pictures, and so on) is a critical component of language and cognitive flexibility—which are defining and significantly limiting deficits for children with autism.

The current projects will be the first to examine these two particular patterns (difference and hierarchy) with children with autism. They also form components of a larger project to develop a comprehensive curriculum and computer-based training and assessment program based on a number of key patterns of responding.

What are the goals of the project?

1. Conduct a multiple baseline design study training children with autism to respond to novel situations within a game context that requires them to figure out similarities and differences on the basis of known information about characters in the game.
2. Conduct a multiple baseline design study training children with autism "class inclusion" skills such as being able to identify that there are more animals than bears, given a number of bears and a number of tigers.
3. Publish the hopefully impressive results!
4. Continue to develop and freely disseminate table-top teaching protocols as well as the TARPA app to interested practitioners and researchers.