Further Examination of Covert Audio Coaching on Improving Employment Skills among Secondary Students with Autism

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulty maintaining employment, and there are few evidenced-based practices to guide professionals when developing employment skills among this population. The purpose of this study was to extend the literature on covert audio coaching (CAC) by examining its effects on high school students with ASD performing a job task. We used a multiple baseline design across participants. With the introduction of CAC, the participants’ job task accuracy and fluency improved. Additionally, the participants’ skills maintained for several weeks and showed preliminary evidence of effectiveness for the same task completed in a community-based worksite.     

ON THE RELATION BETWEEN REINFORCER EFFICACY AND PREFERENCE

Most research on stimulus preference and reinforcer assessment involves a preference assessment that is followed by a reinforcer assessment. Typically, the most and least preferred stimuli are tested as reinforcers. In the current study, we first quantified the reinforcing efficacies of six food items and then assessed relative preference for each item. Relative preference ranking and reinforcer efficacies showed almost perfect concordance for 1 participant and partial concordance for the other. Discordance tended to occur with the weakest reinforcers.     

On A. D. Smith’s constancy based defence of direct realism

This paper presents an argument against A D Smith’s Direct Realist theory of perception, which attempts to defend Direct Realism against the argument from illusion by appealing to conscious perceptual states that are structured by the perceptual constancies. Smith’s contention is that the immediate objects of perceptual awareness are characterised by these constancies, which removes any difficulty there may be in identifying them with the external, or normal, objects of awareness. It is here argued that Smith’s theory does not provide an adequate defence of Direct Realism because it does not adequately deal with the difficulties posed by the possibility of perceptual illusion. It is argued that there remain possible illusory experiences where the immediate objects of awareness, which in Smith’s account are those characterised by perceptual constancies, cannot be identified with the external objects of awareness, contrary to Direct Realism. A further argument is offered to extend this conclusion to all non-illusory cases, by adapting an argument of Smith’s own for the generalising step of the Argument from Illusion. The result is that Smith’s theory does not provide an adequate Direct Realist account of the possibility of perceptual illusion.     

Perceptions of absolute versus relative differences between personal and comparison health risk.

OBJECTIVE: To explain inconsistent results in previous attempts to determine whether, when presented with health risk information, people focus primarily on information about their own risk status or on a comparison with others. DESIGN: A randomized between-groups experiment in which participants were presented with hypothetical cardiac risk information. We examined whether affective responses were primarily sensitive to the relative difference between personal and comparison risk, rather than the absolute difference. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Participants' negative affective response to the risk information. RESULTS: When relative differences were held constant, participants' responses were independently influenced by both personal risk and comparative standing, effects that were greatly attenuated when absolute differences were held constant. When maintaining constant absolute differences, personal and comparison risk information appeared to interact. CONCLUSION: Previous studies tended to maintain constant absolute risk differences and so may have underestimated the impact of personal risk information. Participants' responses were sensitive to the way the risk difference was constructed. Basing experimental design decisions on assumptions about the information participants will respond to can lead to misinterpretations of the basis of risk judgments.     

An apparent-motion confound causes the negative exogenous cuing effect at SOAs with larger numbers of target locations

Salient but irrelevant stimuli seem to cause an automatic orienting of covert attention, facilitating the detection of targets at the cued location for a brief period of time. However, this finding is highly dependent on the number of possible target locations, at least when the simple detection of targets is all that the task requires. Whereas small numbers of possible target locations (e.g., 2 or 3) produce the well-known advantage in response time for valid cue trials (i.e., a positive cuing effect), larger numbers of possible target locations (e.g., 6 or 8) produce a negative cuing effect. If not explained in terms of a nonattentional mechanism, this latter finding raises serious questions about the standard interpretation of positive cuing effects. The present experiment tested a particular nonattentional mechanism: that a confound between target presence and apparent motion, which occurs only on invalid cue trials, is responsible for negative cuing effect. We reduced or eliminated this confound by the use of a new type of catch trial and eliminated the negative cuing effect with large numbers of target locations.     

Contingent Capture at a very short SOA: Evidence against Rapid Disengagement

Salient cues that do not contain the target's defining attribute do not cause a spatial cueing effect in response time when presented 150 ms before the target. This can be explained by Contingent Capture (under which incongruent cues do not capture attention) and also by Rapid Disengagement (under which salient but incongruent cues cause only brief capture). To discriminate between these models, a very short SOA of 35ms was employed in the standard paradigm. As is true for longer SOAs, there was no evidence of attentional capture by salient but incongruent cues. Thus, the evidence to date favours Contingent Capture over Rapid Disengagement.