부산대학교 도서관

Purpose: The common process through which human beings learn new skills is by observing the behaviors of others and the consequences that accompany these behaviors. This process not only prevents wasting time through trial and error but also enhances the development of complex capacities. Observational learning skills comprise the abilities of attention, imitation, and contingency discrimination. In particular, the ability to discriminate contingencies is the most crucial for developing observational learning skills. In the literature, children with autism spectrum disorder exhibit deficiencies in their ability to pay attention to and imitate others in order to learn new skills. Even if they acquire these essential skills after intensive training, children with autism still have difficulty making complex discriminations of another person’s actions and their consequences. This study investigated the effects of contingency discrimination training on the observational learning ability of children with autism spectrum disorder. Methods: The participants were two 6-year-old children with mild autism. A single-subject multiple-baseline experimental design across subjects was used. The independent variable was contingency discrimination training. The dependent variables were the percentage of correct responses in the acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of discrimination and progression of observational learning abilities. Visual analysis and observation data were used to analyze the effect of contingency discrimination training on the participants. Additionally, questionnaires and interviews with the participants’ parents and teachers were conducted, and the results confirmed the social validity of the study. Results/Findings: The results showed that contingency discrimination training (1) enhances, maintains, and generalizes the discriminating contingency skills of children with mild autism; (2) enhances observational learning skills in acquiring naming skills for children with mild autism; and (3) was confirmed by to have a beneficial effect by the caregivers of the participants, thus giving the training social validity. Conclusions/Implications: We suggest professionals fully comprehend all information regarding this training, confirm participants’ repertoires before commencing training, identify new skills that participants are capable of learning through observation, and use the reinforcements in consider to strengthen the motivation of the participants. Furthermore, practitioners who undertake future intervention research should increase the number of participants or include participants of different ages, implement contingency discrimination training to promote a variety of skills, and compare the effectiveness of the training using the experimental multiple-baseline design across behaviors. In addition, high-tech equipment should be used to record the frequency, duration and direction of participants' eye contact, participants’ capacity for selective attention, and their ability to discriminate a figure-ground during intervention.