This study aims to evaluate whether a child’s incorrect responding to questions about the past is due to a skill deficit or a performance deficit.
The authors used a concurrent, multiple-probe design across behaviors to assess the effect of differential reinforcement and an antecedent manipulation on recall responses.
They taught a 9-year-old girl to report on three activities she engaged in across three different locations one to two hours after the activities. The participant successfully learned to recall past events with high accuracy following an intervention phase in which she had to answer all three questions correctly to earn reinforcement, suggesting a performance deficit rather than a skill deficit. The effects did not generalize to new stimuli and were not maintained after 6 months.
This study supports the utility of reinforcement-based strategies in teaching recall to children with a performance deficit. However, issues of maintenance and generalization in teaching recall tasks should be addressed.
They found a potential way to help children increase their accurate reporting of past events.
Responding to a question about the past involves recalling an event for which stimuli are no longer present. Research supports that children diagnosed with Down syndrome (DS) have difficulties with recall responses. It is unclear whether these difficulties stem from a lack of memory skills or from the fact that responding to the question about the past event has no reinforcement history.
Currently, no behavior-analytic studies have demonstrated effective strategies to improve recall skills in children with DS.
