Reversal and nonreversal shifts in autistic children

Reversal and nonreversal shifts in nineteen 2- to 14-year-old autistic children were studied. Each child was taught both a reversal and nonreversal shift discrimination task. The reversal shift condition entailed teaching the child to respond to one (the S+) of a pair of stimuli during training and subsequently reversing the S+ during testing. The nonreversal shift condition consisted of teaching the child two unrelated discriminations during training and testing. The results indicated that the older autistic children did better on reversal shifts than younger children who did better on nonreversal shifts. These findings are consistent with those for normal children.