Abstract: Gaze shifting and eye contact are severely impaired in children with autism. Lack of these skills negatively impacts the development of foundational early social communication skills, such as requesting and joint attention. In previous research, children were taught requesting and joint attention skills, but not necessarily in coordination with gaze shifting and eye contact. In three studies, we explored the effectiveness of prompting and reinforcement procedures to teach eye contact with gaze shifting coordinated with requesting and joint attention across several different skills and teaching sequences. A multiple baseline design across behaviors was used to evaluate the intervention for eight young children with autism (19-33 months of age) who participated in these studies. Results showed rapid acquisition of target responses for all children with some generalization across different levels of requesting and joint attention in one study, and across different functions in two other studies. Generalization across people was observed for all children. While the generalization across responses and functions must be interpreted with caution, it is important because it may suggest the crucial role these skills play in early social communication development and, perhaps, their pivotal role in autism interventions. |
Abstract: According to the DSM-IV, one of the core deficits in Autism is in the impairment of social interaction. Some have suggested that underlying these deficits is the reality that people with Autism do not find social stimuli to be as reinforcing as other types of stimuli (Dawson, Toth, Abbott, Osterling, Munson, Estes & Liaw, 2004, Dawson, 2008). If changes can be made early in development in the way social stimuli are perceived, perhaps other behaviors may then develop more typically (Dawson, 2008, Helt, Kelley, Kinsbourne, Padney, Boorstein, Herbert & Fein, 2008). The current study aimed to use operant and respondent procedures to condition social stimuli that had been empirically shown to not be reinforcing prior to conditioning to function as reinforcers. Three children between 2 and 3 years of age, diagnosed with Autism, participated. Following a thorough free-operant, concurrent choice reinforcer assessment of both social and non-social stimuli, the participants received 7 sessions of a combined, operant and respondent procedure to establish the reinforcing effects of social stimuli found to not be reinforcing. The data were analyzed using a multiple-baseline design with a reversal, to show if the effects of conditioning persist past the training. Results show an increase in responding for the social stimulus during training and follow-up for all participants. |