Investigating the Use of a Blocked Trial Procedure to Facilitate Conditional Discriminations

Abstract

Behavioral therapists, who use behavioral principles to teach skills, typically teach one skill within a behavior repertoire to mastery before teaching another skill within the same repertoire. A fairly common problem exhibited by children with profound cases of autism is the inability to consistently and correctly discriminate between previously isolated skills from a developing repertoire when instructions to perform those skills are randomized. The current study investigated the use of a blocked trial procedure to facilitate conditional skill discriminations.