title: Teaching children with autism when reward is delayed. The effects of two kinds of marking stimuli.
abstract: Three children with autism were taught to identify pictures of emotions in response to their spoken names. Their speed of acquisition was compared using a within-child alternating treatments design across three teaching conditions, each involving a 5 second delay to reinforcement. In the marked-before condition, an instruction encouraged the children to visually orient to the cards before they made their choice response; in the marked-after condition, an attention-eliciting verbal cue (e.g., "Look!") was delivered after both correct and incorrect responses; in the delay condition, these marking cues were omitted. Performance in the no-cue control was inferior to both the marked-before and marked-after conditions, but the difference between the latter two conditions was not significant.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Southampton, UK.
authors.forename: Corinna F
authors.initials: CF
authors.lastname: Grindle
authors.forename: Bob
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Remington
mesh_terms: D001245:Association Learning; D001288:Attention; D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000628:therapy*; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012054:Reinforcement, Psychology; D012201:Reward; D013663:Teaching / Q000379:methods*