Auditory-visual conditional discrimination training (e.g., receptive identification training, listener responses; AVCD) is ubiquitous in early intervention and special education programs. Nevertheless, some learners with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) do not appear to benefit from this training despite use of empirically validated treatments. To…

Visual expertise covers a broad range of types of studies and methodologies. Many studies incorporate some measure(s) of observer performance or how well participants perform on a given task. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis is a method commonly used in signal detection tasks (i.e., those in which the observer must decide whether…

Speech, reading, and writing are the basic forms of linguistic communication. Therefore, it is very important to diagnose any problems with them as early and completely as possible, particularly in children with special needs. One of the methods that focuses primarily on the diagnosis and therapy of such learning difficulties is the one developed…

Although traditional methods to collect similarity data (for multidimensional scaling [MDS]) are robust, they share a key shortcoming. Specifically, the possible pairwise comparisons in any set of objects grow rapidly as a function of set size. This leads to lengthy experimental protocols, or procedures that involve scaling stimulus subsets. We…

The effects of response topography on stimulus class formation were studied in two experiments. In Experiment 1, 32 college students were assigned to 2 response topographies and 2 stimulus sets, in a 2 x 2 design. Students selected stimuli by either moving a mouse to lace an arrow-shaped cursor on the stimulus or pressing a key corresponding to…

The touchscreen testing method for rodents is a computer-automated behavioral testing method that allows computer graphic stimuli to be presented to rodents and the rodents to respond to the computer screen via a nose-poke directly to the stimulus. The advantages of this method are numerous; however, a systematic study of the parameters that…

We examined the relationship between three discrimination skills (visual, visual matching-to-sample, and auditory-visual) and four stimulus modalities (object, picture, spoken, and video) in assessing preferences of leisure activities for 7 adults with developmental disabilities. Three discrimination skills were measured using the Assessment of…