Teaching Left-right Spatial Relations to Individuals with Autism and Intellectual Disability

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Elaine de Carvalho
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Outros Autores: Chamel Elias, Nassim
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Psicologia (Universidade de Brasília. Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/revistaptp/article/view/19484
• topic: Relações espaciais; Instrução com múltiplos exemplares; Esvanecimento de dicas; Autismo; Deficiência intelectual; Spatial relations; Multiple exemplar instruction; Prompt fading; Autism; Intellectual disability

The recognition of the left-right concept is an evidence of the body notion development and is part of a process of symbolic lateralization. In this sense, the goal of the present study was to teach listener responses to left-right spatial relations involving body parts and to verify the use of these relations in a different context. Two experiments were conducted, whichdiffered in terms of the age and the input repertoire of the participants and and in terms of experimental design. In the first, an A-B design was used and the participants were a boy with autism and two adolescents with intellectual disabilities. In the second, a concurrent multiple baseline design across participants was used and the participants were four boys with autism. The teaching phase involved the use of a multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) and prompt fading (imitation, gestural, verbal and physical prompts) procedure. The results indicated that the participants learned the taught relations and used those relations in a different context (generalization). The use of MEI and fading showed to be promising in teaching left-right spatial relations to participants with a small verbal repertoire.