A comparison of methods to teach visual-visual discriminations and auditory-visual discriminations to children with autism

The Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities (ABLA) test is an assessment that assesses 6 basic discriminations. Two of the 6 discriminations (referred to as Levels) were investigated in this study. ABLA Level 4 is a quasi-identity match-to-sample discrimination, and ABLA Level 6 is an auditory-visual discrimination. Study 1 investigated the effectiveness of two methods to teach visual-visual identity discriminations to two children with autism. Study 2 investigated a method to teach a visual quasi-identity match-to-sample task to one child with autism, and study 3 investigated a method to teach auditory-visual discriminations to two children with autism. Once children mastered the training tasks they were then tested to see if their skills generalized to ABLA Level 4 (for Study 1 and Study 2) and ABLA Level 6 (for Study 3). Results of Study 1 indicated that one child was able to learn the matching task in 125 trials, and the other child was not able to learn the matching task. Generalization to ABLA Level 4 did not occur. In Study 2, the child learned the quasi-identity matching task and generalization to ABLA Level 4 did occur. In Study 3, both children learned at least one auditory-visual discrimination task, and generalization to ABLA Level 6 occurred for one child.