Date of Award
12-1-2017
Degree Name
Master of Science
Department
Behavior Analysis and Therapy
First Advisor
Stanley, Caleb
Abstract
Instructors evaluated the efficacy of the PEAK Transformation module in establishing derived relations among coordination, comparison, opposition, distinction, hierarchical, and deictic relational frame families with three children with autism. A total of nine different skills were trained and assessed to determine if untrained relations with novel stimuli emerged. Baseline confirmed that the participants in fact could not derive the relations of their target skills. In the training phase, the participants were taught multiple exemplars of each relational frame, and were then tested for the emergence of derived relations. Based on the data collected during the testing phase, mastery of the skills was achieved for all of the nine total programs conducted. The results based on the testing phase of the current study suggest that by using the procedures and programs in the PEAK Transformation module, children with autism can derive relations among arbitrary stimuli to general settings. The results also suggest that the procedures can be generalized across populations in clinical and home based settings. Keywords: Arbitrary Stimuli, Autism, derived relations, PEAK, Relational Frame Theory
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