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Comparison of conditioning impairments in children with Down syndrome, autistic spectrum disorders and mental age‐matched controls
Author(s) -
Reed P.,
Staytom L.,
Stott S.,
Truzoli R.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
journal of intellectual disability research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.941
H-Index - 104
eISSN - 1365-2788
pISSN - 0964-2633
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2788.2011.01454.x
Subject(s) - psychology , autism , learning disability , observational study , developmental psychology , mental age , down syndrome , autism spectrum disorder , intervention (counseling) , clinical psychology , audiology , cognitive psychology , psychiatry , cognition , medicine , pathology
Background This study investigated the relative ease of learning across four tasks suggested by an adaptation of Thomas's hierarchy of learning in children with Down syndrome, autism spectrum disorders and mental age‐matched controls. Methods Learning trials were carried out to investigate observational learning, instrumental learning, reversal learning and conditional discrimination. Results The sample with autism spectrum disorders performed worse than the other two groups on the observational learning and conditional discrimination tasks, while the Down syndrome sample performed worse on the instrumental learning task. Conclusions These findings are discussed in terms of there implications for reward‐based educational intervention programmes.