A Systematic Replication of Teaching Children With Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities Correct Responding to False-Belief Tasks

Behavioral research has demonstrated that children with autism spectrum disorder can be taught to recognize the false beliefs of others using video modeling (e.g., Charlop-Christy & Daneshvar Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 5(1), 12-21, 2003; LeBlanc et al. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 36(2), 253-257, 2003). The current study extended such research by teaching three children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and other developmental disabilities to respond appropriately to false-belief tasks using behavioral intervention strategies conducted in the natural environment with people in their enviornment. We used a nonconcurrent multiple-baseline across-participants design to evaluate the use of multiple-exemplar training, prompting, and reinforcement for training correct responses with two false-belief tasks: the hide-and-seek task and the M&Ms task. We also conducted a pre/posttest of an untrained false-belief task, the Sally-Anne task. All participants learned to pass the hide-and-seek task and the M&Ms task and improved on their performance on the Sally-Anne task during the posttest.