The Effects of Intertrial Intervals on Receptive Tasks for Young Children with Autism

Abstract

A small number of studies have evaluated the effects of different lengths of intertrial intervals on the speed of learning and found that shorter durations of intertrial intervals appear to support faster learning.The purpose of this study was to conduct a systematic replication of the effects of intertrial intervals on receptive labeling by three children (ages 4 to 7 years old) diagnosed on the autism spectrum. A parallel treatments design was used to compare the effects of short intertrial intervals (5-10 seconds) to longer inter-trial intervals (15-20 seconds) during discrete trial teaching. The results were mixed. One participant learned all of the pairs in roughly the same number of trials using both lengths of inter-intervals. The other two participants sometimes learned a pair of pictures with fewer trials using the short intertrial intervals and sometimes using the long intertrial intervals. While participants appeared to learn the tasks in a similar number of teaching trials, all participants learned the tasks in a shorter amount of total teaching time when the short intertrial intervals were used.