Comparing the Performances of Youth with Intellectual Disability and Autism Spectrum Disorder with a Distributed and an Accumulated Reinforcement

Previous studies comparing the effectiveness of the distributed and accumulated reinforcement on the intellectual and developmental disability concluded that accumulated reinforcement is more effective. However, the task difficulty, types of reinforcer, and participants’ characteristics of previous studies were limited. The present study compared the effectiveness of distributed and accumulated reinforcement on the difficult task using food reinforcer and examined whether theses effects depend on participants’ diagnostic characteristics. A total of 33 participants(19 intellectual disability and 14 autism spectrum disorder(ASD)) conducted the visuospatial working memory task under both reinforcement conditions. The dependent variables were accuracy rate, correct response per minute, response per minute. The results showed that the accuracy rate and correct response per minute were significantly higher in the accumulated reinforcement. In addition, the ASD group showed a significantly higher accuracy rate in accumulated reinforcement than distributed reinforcement, but the intellectual disability group showed no differences between conditions. These results suggest that children with intellectual disability and ASD show a better performance under the accumulated reinforcement, and the characteristics of ASD are relevant to the effects of accumulated reinforcement.