Some effects of immediacy on healthy food selection

Children on the autism spectrum tend to consume fewer healthy foods than typically developing children. Given the negative effects of unhealthy eating, it is important to increase healthy food selection. The current study examined whether manipulating the delay to reinforcement would increase healthy food selection in a concurrent-operants assessment. During the concurrent-operants assessment, participants chose between a snack and a fruit and the researchers systematically added a delay to the snack to switch the allocation of responding from the snack to the fruit. The results showed that one participant's response allocation switched from the snack to the fruit at a delay of 30 s and two participants' response allocation switched at the 60-s delay. This suggests that manipulating the delay to reinforcement may increase healthy food selection for some children on the autism spectrum.