Relationship of Self-stimulation to learning in Autistic Children

A research summary by Jennifer Morrison - CUNY Queens College

Koegel, R. L. & Covert, A. (1972). The relationship of self-stimulation to learning in autistic children. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 5, 381 – 387.

Purpose of the study: To complete a functional analysis of the relationship of self-stimulatory behavior to learning in children diagnosed with autism.


Participants: The study included three children diagnosed with autism. These three children engaged in a variety of self-stimulatory behaviors such as body rocking, hand play, gazing at lights and repetitive vocalizations that interrupted their learning experiences.


Settings: The setting of the two experiments was at the three children’s home.


Target behaviors: Rhythmic body rocking, waving of hands: or objects in front of the eyes, gazing: which included looking at the house light, hand gripping: between fingers on both hands, hair twirling, hand/arm flapping, and repetitive vocalizations.


Procedure: In order to treat the occurrence of self-stimulatory behavior, the experimenters used a suppression technique which in experiment one included saying “no” and using a physical prompt to stop the self-stimulatory behavior in experiment one.

In the second experiment, they did not use the suppression technique and instead used a discrimination training exercise with the children. So for example, they would do a typical discrete trial type of format and present the child with the colors yellow and green and teach the child how to choose between the two colors. The experimenters hoped that by doing this it would decrease the amount of self-stimulatory behavior.


Results: The results of this study show several interesting things. In experiment number one, they showed that the suppression technique decreased the amount of self-stimulatory behavior but there was no evidence to show an increase in the number of correct trials of discrimination.
In experiment two, however, it showed that for one participant that the amount of self-stimulatory behavior was decreased and also the percent of correct trials increased also.


Implications: This study has quite a few major implications. First of all, from the results of experiment two, this show that perhaps indeed a positive reinforcement procedure is more effective than a punishment procedure in decreasing the amount of self-stimulatory behavior. The nice thing about the discrimination training method is that it also increased the percent trials correct by this particular student. This is an important implication in the treatment of self-stimulatory behavior in children with autism. The use of punishment should be a last resort and only used when all other possible reinforcement strategies have been tried. It is also important to look at the relationship between the self-stimulatory behavior and learning. It has been shown in this study that when a child is engaging in self-stimulatory behavior that they have a hard time attending to other things in the environment. This is an important idea to keep in mind in school and home based programs, especially before teaching a given topic. It is very important that if a child that is engaging in self-stimulatory behavior they are engaging in appropriate attending behaviors before beginning a new learning trial, and also that they are attending to the correct stimuli in the environment in general. If these two things are not present, then the chances that learning will happen are less likely in some situations.