Children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may have, among other
deficits, low frequency of visual contact (look at the face of another person) and little
interest in human voices. This can affect the social development and acquisition of
verbal repertoire. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of stimulus-stimulus pairing
procedure on: (1) the preference for human faces and voices of two children diagnosed
with autism and (2) the performance of such participants in a set of social tests. The
procedure was divided into two phases: 1) face conditioning and 2) voice conditioning.
Phase 1 comprised baseline evaluation (multiple measures of responding to face figures
and face itself) and face conditioning (“face-figure/reinforcer” pairing and
“face/reinforcer” pairing). Phase 2 consisted of assessment of preference for voices,
followed by voice conditioning, in which the reproduction of recorded voices was
paired with the reinforcers. Frequency and duration of attend to voices and faces were
measured in pre and post tests. The results show that measures based on response time
were more appropriate to assess the effects of manipulation, with more evident effect of
“voice-reinforcer” pairing than visual pairing. This study describes advances with
respect to operant repertoires (observing responses) that result in exposure to human
faces and voices in children diagnosed with autism. It is suggested that future studies
explore possible functional relation between voice and face conditioning on the
acquisition of other repertoires such as joint attention response, joint attention initiation,
as well as verbal repertoires, such as tact and mand.
|
