Observational Learning - Observational Learning and Children With Autism

Observational Learning and Children With Autism

There are not a lot of studies done on the acquisition of knowledge through observation, but there are none on observational learning in children with low-functioning autism according to Nadel, Aouka, Coulon, Grad-Vincendon, Canet, Fagard & Bursztejn (2011). This group of researchers set out to change this by looking at whether or not children with low-functioning autism are able to learn through observation only. There were two groups, children aged four to nine diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and a control group of children. Each group was further divided into two subgroups based on developmental age (24 or 36 months). All four groups then received different tasks corresponding to their developmental age. The task involved a red box in which the children were trying to get the candy inside. This study lasted nine days in which all of the children were given the box on the first day and given time to try to get the object out. They were then shown a demonstration video twice but were not given the box after the demonstration to try to get the candy. The following day, the participants were only given the box with no video demonstrations to test for observational learning. This was repeated seven days later.

Nadel et al. (2011) found that the children who did not have autism showed improvements after the first demonstration, with the children of a younger developmental age improving one week later and the older children improving after they had only seen the demonstration once. Children with autism improved after the second demonstration only. The authors believed that this means that children with autism progress the same as typical children, however, it takes longer for the children with autism to learn. They also believed this to mean that children with autism can form motor representations for a task without prior experience with that task and that they can correct motor representations after previously not being able to do a task. The researchers argued that the difference in the need for more demonstrations for children with autism was not due to a lack of attention but more as a result of an increased difficulty of creating a motor representation of an action that leads to a remote goal as opposed to an immediate goal. Therefore, children with autism do learn through observational learning so it is important for people who work with children with autism to know this so that they can act in appropriate ways that can facilitate the learning of these children.

In free play, children with autism often display self-stimulatory behaviours that inhibit appropriate behaviours and decrease their ability to learn new behaviours. In one study,, the researchers were looking to determine the effect of the observation of peers on appropriate toy-playing skills in autisticlike children. They were also examining the effects that training can have on autisticlike children in the training situation and in a generalization setting. Before this study was done in 1986, there were no previous studies looking at the ability of autisticlike children to learn similar skills to the ones they learned in training through the observation of a peer in a different setting than that of training. This study wanted to provide insight into the generalization of skills of autisticlike children through observational learning. The participants included three autisticlike boys with a mean chronological age of 4.4 and a mean age of 2.5. Six other boys with a mean age chronological age of 4.3 and a mean age of 3.2 that had good receptive and language skills were chosen as the peer models for the experiment. Each participant took part in a pretest in order to determine ten different toys that the child did not play with appropriately, a baseline test of free play where children were allowed to play in a room where the 10 toys determined in the pretest were present as well as another peer, and two training sessions that were each followed by a generalization and maintenance condition. In the first training session, the participant would watch a peer that they did not see in the baseline test, who was correctly playing with a toy. The second training was the same as the first except that the participant was exposed to both a new peer model and a new toy. The amount of exposure to a modeled play task was the independent variable and it was also manipulated through additional tasks, models and settings. Tryon and Keane (1986) identified the dependent variables as the training task acquisition, generalization in free-play, and the frequency of both self-stimulatory behaviour and imitative play behaviours.

The authors found that all three of the autisticlike boys were able to learn to imitate the peer model and to play with an unfamiliar toy in the training sessions through the observation of a peer model. In the following generalization and maintenance sessions, all of the autisticlike boys learned to play with the unfamiliar toy that they had not been trained in. The researchers noticed that the boys decreased their self-stimulatory behaviours as a result of the imitative play learned in training. The authors suggested that enhanced imitation of play behaviours may have been due to the use of multiple peer models. Therefore, the authors suggested that training autisticlike children with multiple peer models may help to generalize their learning to new tasks that are similar to the observed task. It is also possible that the decrease in self-stimulatory behaviours of autisticlike children may have been the result of those behaviours being replaced with more appropriate self-stimulatory behaviours. More research is needed on observational learning and children with autism in such areas as free play in the natural environment and whether or not observational learning interferes with how children spontaneously learn to play.