Circumscribed interests are a fascinating and an understudied phenomenon in some individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Research in this area is likely to contribute to our understanding of ASDs and to advancing developmental knowledge on learning processes used to adapt to the demands of everyday social life. This study reports on a…

Seven mentally retarded adolescents received either verbal or nonverbal training on a shape-sorting task within a multiple baseline design. Both training sequences resulted in the successful acquisition of the target performance, but only the verbal training sequence facilitated generalization of performance to a novel shape and to a new…

The effectiveness of D. Ausubel's Advance Organizer, an introduction presented before the material to be taught, was tested with 96 mildly retarded adolescents. Results of a three-way analysis of variance indicated a facilitative effect under the written presentation, especially for high-level questions and a negative effect under the oral…