The effects of forward chaining and contingent social interaction on the acquisition of complex sharing responses by children with autism

Children with autism have deficits in social interaction, including the failure to engage in sharing responses. Four children with autism were taught a sharing response chain. The treatment package (manual guidance, auditory prompts, and contingent access to toy play and social interaction with the recipient instructor) was introduced successively across participants in a multiple-baseline design. None of the participants engaged in the sharing response chain during baseline. Systematic increases in responding occurred for all four participants in the presence of training stimuli. In addition, there were systematic increases in responding to non-trained probe stimuli. Also, during pre- and post-test measures, the participants demonstrated sharing in the presence of peers in a non-training classroom containing non-trained toys. Furthermore, social validity measures indicated that judges scored more post-treatment responses than baseline responses as “sharing.”