Association for Behavior Analysis International

It is well established that individuals with autism have deficits in social skills especially joint attention, social referencing and social conversations. Efforts to remediate these deficits have proven to be challenging as the source of difficulty has much to do the failure of social behaviors to function as motivation operations. In the current symposium we will present data from three lines of work in this area. In the first paper, Deitchman, examined the effects of video modeling and feedback on the development of social conversation skills. They taught participants to respond to a generalized repertoire of natural social cues including affective, gestural and verbal cues discriminative for the availability of social reinforcement, and found that all participants learned to respond appropriately during conversation generalization trials. In the second paper, Holohan, implemented a protocol including video modeling and feedback to train both therapists and parents how to teach three different joint attention skills. In the third paper, Walker extended work on social referencing by teaching children to respond differentially to an adults facial expression in the presence of an ambiguous situation such as a basket with a hidden object and found generalization across different stimuli.

Few studies address higher order stereotypy, such as insistence on sameness, perseverative patterns of social interaction, and highly circumscribed interests for participants with ASD. Researchers have characterized these behaviors as difficulties with variant responding, and some have attempted to bring repetitive behavior under discriminative control using multiple schedules of reinforcement that target arbitrary or tangible natural discriminative stimuli. This study extended the literature by teaching participants to respond to a generalized repertoire of natural social cues including affective, gestural and verbal cues discriminative for the availability of social reinforcement. Video modeling was used during discrimination training and video feedback during conversation trials to promote the saliency of natural conversation cues. Inter-observer agreement and procedural integrity data were taken on at least 50% of all trials during all conditions and was 80% or higher. All participants learned to discriminate S+ and S- cues and respond appropriately during conversation trials and also during all generalization probes.

Developing technology to teach social referencing is important because social referencing is an important safety skill. The purpose of this study was to teach 3 toddlers with autism social referencing using a multiple baseline across participants design. Social referencing is a chain of behavior in which a child gaze shifts from an ambiguous situation to an adult, and then changes their behavior based on the adults facial expression. Participants were trained using differential reinforcement and time-delay prompting to gaze shift from an ambiguous object, an unknown container, to an adult and reach or not reach based on the adults facial expression. Mastery at the table with a previously unknown container was followed by generalization probes on the floor, with a second experimenter, and 2 other unknown containers. All participants acquired social referencing during training, and the skill generalized to a second person, to another setting, and to novel containers. The implications for using differential reinforcement and time-delay prompting to teach social referencing are discussed. Inter-observer agreement and procedural integrity data were taken on at least 33% of all trials during all conditions and was 80% or higher.