Promoting Perspective-Taking in Adults with Intellectual Disabilities through Naturalistic Conditional Discrimination Training

Abstract

Perspective-taking is a social skill that allows an individual to put themselves in another’s place and understand how that person would act in a given situation. Previous research has shown that various populations -including people with intellectual disabilities- may experience difficulties deploying this skill. From a behavioral perspective, this repertoire emerges from a set of learned relations among stimuli that enable the individual to locate themself in relation to other people, places, or points in time. Relational Frame Theory proposes that deictic and hierarchical frames underlie this ability. The present study introduces a training protocol designed to teach responses to deictic and hierarchical discriminations through a series of activities carried out in a naturalistic context with three adults with Down syndrome.