Procedures to condition reinforcers for people with ASD: literature review

Abstract

Individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) commonly have restricted interests, and for this reason it can be fairly difficult to achieve the intervention goals. The identification and conditioning of new reinforcers is an essential step to acquire new behaviors in the treatment of people with ASD. Therefore, this research aims to analyze bibliographic review of articles that investigate procedures to turn neutral stimuli into conditioned reinforcers for individuals with ASD. Accordingly, the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and Behavior Interventions were used as a database for papers published between 2000 and 2018. In that period, ten papers were found that fit the established criteria, four of which used observation as a strategy to condition new reinforcers, four used stimulus pairing and two simple discrimination training. The results indicated that among the papers found, eight achieved their objective, one had negative results and one had inconsistent findings. However, among these eight with positive results, two articles obtained only immediate results (the fomer neutral stimuli maintained its conditioned reinforcer function for a short period of time). In addition, the observation procedure showed the best results for creating conditioned reinforcers.