In recent years several studies (for a review, Estévez, 2005, and Estévez and Fuentes, 2006) have demonstrated that differential outcomes procedure (DOP) can be used as a technique to facilitate memory-based performance in humans, especially in those people with memory impairments. This procedure is specifically referred to the increase in speed of acquisition or terminal accuracy that occurs in a conditional discrimination training when each discriminative stimulus-response sequence is always followed by a particular outcome, generally a different type of reinforce. In other words, each response to be learnt is associated by a specific consequence.
In this talk Ms Laura Esteban Garcia will introduce you some experiments that try to explore whether the DOP may enhance memory-based performance in delayed matching-to-sample tasks (spatial) in 5 to 9 year-old children and in children and teenagers with Down’s syndrome or with autism.
