Establishing helping behavior in a child with autism : Acquisition of observing responses

Various discriminative stimuli set the occasion for helping behavior. In the present study, an 8-year-old boy with autism was trained to help a person who is confronted with some difficulty. The discriminative stimulus conditions in the present study were (1) a verbal stimulus condition : a person requests help from others, (2) a environmental stimulus condition a person needs a tool that others have, and (3) a compound stimulus condition : verbal stimuli and observing responses. As a result of the training, the boy acquired helping behavior in the presence of all 3 classes of discriminative stimuli. This result suggests that children with autism can understand not only verbal and environmental stimuli, but also their own observing responses, so that these various discriminative stimuli can be used to establish helping behavior.