Many individuals with developmental disabilities cannot accurately remember past events; recall may be improved by learning to emit precurrent, or problem solving, behaviors to make correct responses more probable. Visual imagining is a problem solving strategy that involves seeing in the absence of a stimulus that was once seen (Skinner, 1974). Kisamore, Carr, and LeBlanc (2011) evaluated a visual imagining procedure on an intraverbal categorization task with four typically developing children; this procedure did not establish high rates of responding, but responding did increase when participants were prompted to use the strategy and taught a rule to reduce prompting. In In the current study, a visual imagining procedure was evaluated with five adolescents (ages 12-15 years) with an autism spectrum disorder. Recall was evaluated before and after the training condition at no delay and at a delay of up to two hours. The visual imagining procedure increased recall for three of the five participants when no delay was imposed and, for two participants, increased recall at no delay and at untrained delays of up to two hours. For two participants, repeated exposure to stimuli and a correction procedure were required to improve recall.
Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC)
Autism Research Database (AFD)
