New study on an operant approach to teach joint attention skills to children with autism
Jørn Isaksen and Per Holth has in the recent number of Behavioral Interventions published a new study on teaching joint attentions skills to children with autism, using behavior analysis techniques.
Joint attention is described as one of the core deficits in autism, and are seen as predictive of later development in areas as language, social functioning an others. The development of effective teaching protocols for these skills may therefor be a great contribution to improvement for children with ASD.
This study uses the Whalen and Schreibman (2003) study as the basis, and modifying their protocol. The modification consists of establishing normal social behavior consequences as diskriminative stimuli for positively reinforced responses and turn-taking tasks that required response to joint attention and initiating to joint attention responses and were similar to natural interaction opportunities.
The study shows that all children included where able to learn the responses and that both RJA and IJA skills were generally maintained or improved from immediately post-training to the follow-up test 1 month after termination of specifically programmed joint attention training.
It´s a great study, and the article describes in detail both participants and procedures in an excellent manner, making the use of this results into practice and replication easy.
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