4. General discussion

From the RFT account, perspective-taking involves complex patterns of derived relational responding in accordance with the deictic relational frames of I-you, here-there, and nowthen. As noted in the introduction, many studies have investigated the RFT approach to perspective-taking through the Barnes-Holmes protocol and, in recent years, the format of the original protocol has been modified in different studies. However, no published study to date has compared the performance in the original protocol with new perspective-taking protocols. This approach was adopted in the current study with a view to analyzing differences between the original Barnes-Holmes protocol and an adapted protocol which included different scenarios and adaptations of reversal cues.

The results of both Study 1 and Study 2 indicated between-group differences with regard to variations in the format of protocol in terms of performance accuracy. Our ability to draw firm conclusions from these findings is limited because of the small sample size. Nonetheless, some interesting trends were apparent in the data, the most important being the role of stimuli variability between trials in the perspective-taking protocol. The difference in the number of correct responses for both relational complexity and relation type between conditions in Study 1 and Study 2, suggest the repetition of similar words developed by Y. Barnes-Holmes [5] could cause fatigue and lack of interest for the task. After listening to the words black chair and blue chair many times, participants become confused and lose interest. On the other hand, whereas Condition 3 in Study 1 or our deictic protocol in Study 2 did not need to repeat any trials, the Barnes-Holmes protocol of the Conditions 1–2 required more than 10 repetitions. These differences in number of repetitions requested by participants could be due to the fact that in the Condition 3 and Study 2, each trial presented a new and unique scenario, making the task less cognitively demanding. As mentioned earlier, for Conditions 1 and 2 in Study 1 some participants did not understand why the same trial was being done again. These findings are consistent with recent extensions of deictic teaching procedures which incorporate different and more naturalistic contexts with the purpose of bringing them in line with everyday discourse [18, 19, 22].

Comparison of means between conditions in Study 1 and the condition in Study 2 were performed using non-parametric tests (Mann-Whitney U). According to relational complexity, the differences between Study 2 versus Condition 2 (p < 0.02) and Study 2 versus Condition 3b were significant (p < 0.05) in reversed relations. For all other comparisons, the differences were

The results for relation type from all Conditions in Study 1 and Study 2 are presented in Figure 2. The number of correct responses in I-YOU/ HERE-THERE double reversals in Condition 2 was zero. The data indicated that participants in Study 2 achieved the best results for

Non-parametric tests (Mann-Whitney U) revealed significant differences between Condition 2 and Study 2 in NOW-THEN simple relations (<0.02), in HERE-THERE reversed relations (<0.02) and in NOW-THEN reversed relations (=0.02); and between Condition 3b and Study 2

In connection with the number of repetitions of trials, it is also worth emphasizing that it was

From the RFT account, perspective-taking involves complex patterns of derived relational responding in accordance with the deictic relational frames of I-you, here-there, and now-

all relation types compared with Condition 1–3 in Study 1.

Figure 2. Mean percentage of correct responses for each condition by relation type.

not necessary to repeat any trials for the condition in Study 2.

in NOW-THEN reversed relations (<0.05).

4. General discussion

non-significant.

84 Behavior Analysis

Although the findings from both studies are consistent with those of Vilardaga et al. [20] because a set of contextual cues that were systematically different to each other allowed participants to more reliably identify responses based on the underlying deictic relations, different changes were carried out to Study 2 to specifically fit a childhood population. The exact terms I-you and now-then remained constant in line with the original Barnes-Holmes protocol. Consistent with Lovett and Rehfeldt [22], evoking I-you framing response based on different personal deictic cues, required a more complex ability in derived relational responding. On the other hand, as discussed above from a RFT point of view [4], responding to temporal relations implies responding relationally to a situation where the relation is defined not by the physical properties, but by some other feature of the situation. Abstracting the physical dimension of concepts such as yesterday, tomorrow, or next week, requires highly verbal actions. For this reason, temporal frames of deictic protocols should be adapted to the verbal repertoire of children. These results support the need for adaptation of the assessment tools to the population targeted, raising important issues that should be addressed in future research.

Limitations of the current study should also be considered. Sample size and number of trials by protocol are too small to establish strong conclusions. The protocols designed are part of a bigger research project in which children are being trained in perspective-taking via deictic relations. The protocols of the present study should be considered as screening tools, not training protocols. As previously mentioned, other studies [10, 14, 21] also used a short version of the 18 trials for testing. Future work with larger samples and protocols is needed to clarify this issue. Despite these limitations, the current paper seems to lend support to further elaborations of the protocol originally developed by Y. Barnes- Holmes [5] for the specific target population, i.e. typically developing children. Summarizing the results of present study, variability between scenarios, more natural and familiar contexts, direct interpersonal deictic relations (I-You versus Other-Other), specific locations for spatial relations, and non-complex temporal relations, seem to be key features for improving the children's performances. These findings support the idea of developing measures of perspective-taking from an RFT approach aimed at facilitating generalization towards other tasks or everyday contexts.

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