Enhanced Tact Acquisition Using the Differential Outcomes Procedure in Children with Developmental and Intellectual Disability

Abstract

Pairing discriminative stimuli with unique reinforcers provides an additional cue to correct responding. In the current study, we evaluated the effectiveness of the differential outcomes procedure in teaching novel tacts and facilitating transfer of tacts to novel discriminative stimuli. Four children diagnosed with developmental or intellectual disability were taught a unique pair of related tacts both under a differential outcomes condition and under a nondifferential outcomes condition where the reinforcers were uncorrelated with the sample stimuli. In the former, the different outcomes were two forms of the same reinforcer. Three out of four participants met the mastery criterion sooner under the differential outcomes condition. Two participants also generalized to novel stimuli under the differential outcomes condition. When we tested for the inclusion of the reinforcers in the stimulus class, three participants demonstrated the acquisition of emergent stimulus–outcomes and response–outcomes relations. The study provides support for the use of the differential outcomes procedure as a cost-effective means of enhancing the acquisition of discriminated responses in an applied setting.