Attention Training Procedures

Description of the Strategy

Children with developmental disabilities often have difficulties attending to important features of environmental stimuli. These attentional deficits are most keenly experienced during preacademic and academic skills teaching for some children. For example, a child may show difficulties distinguishing between the printed words bat and cat because he or she fails to attend to the first letter of each of the words. In this example, the beginning letters can be regarded as the critical, relevant, or distinctive features of the two stimuli, as it is based on those letters that a distinction between the two words can be drawn. A similar difficulty is when the child attends to only a restricted number of relevant stimulus features, such as overattending to a person's eyeglasses and subsequently failing to recognize the person without his or her eyeglasses. Failures to attend to relevant features of stimuli can impede a child's progress in acquiring any number of rudimentary scholastic and daily living skills.

Attending to only a restricted number of relevant stimulus features, or stimulus overselectivity, is a common barrier for children with autism. Stimulus overselectivity may in part account for several learning deficits that children with autism often exhibit. First, overselectivity may account for the difficulties that some children with autism have in social situations where the child must attend to many important social cues in order for the social interaction to be successful (i.e., the other person's facial expression, eye contact, gestures, speech inflection, pitch, volume, etc., and the particular situation). Second, stimulus overselectivity may contribute to a child's failure to generalize new skills to novel settings where those cues that were selectively attended to during training are absent. Third, stimulus overselectivity may explain the limitations some children have when external prompts (i.e., gestures or physical guidance) are used to facilitate skill acquisition, as the child may selectively attend to the prompt and not the relevant features of the training stimuli. Children with autism, mental retardation, and other developmental disabilities, as well as young typically developing children, have been shown to demonstrate attentional deficits such as those described. Although such failures in stimulus control are often described in terms of attentional failures, a behavior analytic account of these and other learning difficulties assumes that the source of the difficulties is the learning environment that has been arranged for the child. The challenge, then, is for the child's environment to be arranged in such a way that the critical features of stimuli are identified and enhanced.

Several attention training procedures fall under the rubric of within-stimulus prompting. Within-stimulus [Page 680]prompting involves enhancing the critical features of a training stimulus so that a prompt is presented within that critical feature. In other words, an inherent characteristic of the stimulus itself is magnified, and as the child's responding comes under discriminative control, the prompt is faded. Within-stimulus prompting requires that physical modifications are made to the training stimuli. For example, in teaching a child to discriminate between the printed words bat and cat, the critical features of the stimuli might be enhanced by enlarging the beginning letter of each of the two words. As the child's accuracy in discriminating between the two words improves, the size of the two letters is gradually reduced across successive trials, until the letters in each word are all the same size. This is known as size fading. Another possibility is to exaggerate the intensity of the first letter of each of the words. The beginning letter of each word might be prepared in a dark, heavy font relative to the other letters of each word. As the child's accuracy improves, the intensity of the two letters is gradually reduced across successive trials, until all the letters are of the same intensity. This is known as intensity fading. Within-stimulus prompts are effective in teaching children who show attentional deficits such as overselective responding because the prompt cannot distract their attention from the critical feature of the stimulus; the prompt is the critical feature.

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