Incidence of Latency as a Measure of Learning in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is currently receiving a lot of attention in the scientific community. Along with the increased level of research, studies using children with ASD may not be using the most effective standards to measure learning. Latency, defined as the time it takes to respond to the onset of a stimulus, currently is not often used in autism research even though other studies have shown latency as being an accurate cue for accuracy of an answer. With this in mind a review of the literature was conducted to see if the current studies using discrimination training in children with ASD would benefit from using latency as a measurement of learning. The literature review did indeed reveal that latency would not be difficult to implement in studies and it would be a good measurement to assess learning in children with autism.