A Comparison of Error-Correction Procedures Within Audio–Visual Conditional Discrimination Training

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often emit errors during the establishment of conditional discriminations. These children may not respond to more traditional error-correction procedures, such as least-to-most prompting. In this study, we compared two other types of error-correction procedures, namely embedding an identity-matching task as a differential observing response (DOR; Fisher et al. in J Appl Behav Anal 40:489–499, 2007 ) compared with a second-order fixed ratio 3/fixed ratio 1 (FR3 FR1) schedule with response cost procedure (Fisher et al. in J Appl Behav Anal 47:738–748, 2014 ). Results garnered from a multiple baseline design with embedded adapted alternating treatment design components demonstrated that the identity-matching/DOR procedure lead to superior acquisition of conditional discriminations for two boys with ASD. These findings suggest that for audio-conditional discrimination training, the identity-matching/DOR method may be more effective over the second-order FR3 FR1 with response cost approach.