Caregivers of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and other developmental disorders often participate in behavioral and other interventions. Parents are often the ones that spend the most time with their children and know their children best, and should therefor be actively learning and implementing effective interventions. But in order to be effective the principles of the interventions must be followed between and after clinical observations and follow-ups. Up to now there are no systematic demonstrations of this adherence to interventions in the literature. But now Moore and Symons has published a study on adherence to treatment in behavioral intervention in this issue of Behavior Modification.
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Positively Autism is a online newsletter providing excellent news and updates on autism and autism treatment, focusing on Applied Behavior Analysis and Pivotal Response Treatment. And this issue is focusing on PRT, and includes great resources. i really recommend all interested in autism, ABA and PRT to sign up for this newsletter.
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Hierarchical classifications is an important form of responding that most people engage in every day, and is characterized by three features: transitive class containment, asymmetry and property inheritance. Transitive class containment involves that if A is a member of class B , and B is a member of C, then A is also a member of C. Asymmetry involves that if class C contains class B, class B do not contain class C. Property inheritance of course involves that the properties of the superordinate class are shared with all members of subordinate classes, but not the other way.
In Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 96(2), Slattery, Steward, and O´Hara has published a study involving three experiment investigating responding consistent with transitive class containment. The first one replicating Griffe & Dougher (2002). This article describes the procedures and gives great pussobilites for further research in an important area, for therapy and education.
Image: graur codrin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Stimulus over-selectivity is described as behavior being controlled by one element of the discriminative stimuli, or environment. Stimulus over-selectivity may pose great challenges in teaching children with autism and other developmental disabilities. And may also be a challenge in non-clinical populations.
Some have regarded stimulus over-selectivity as an attentional deficit. But in a study published in the current volume of Research in Developmental Disabilities, Reynolds and Reed provide data that indicated that over-selectivity does not come from an attention deficit, but from an over-sensitive comparator being sensitive to otherwise not noticeable differences between the strength of the stimuli, often the case in autism spectrum disorders, or from a comparison between relatively weakly-learned about stimuli, with will have a relatively greater difference in strength between them than well-learned about stimuli, often the car of cognitive strain. This theory of stimulus over-selectivity will have implications for reinforcement schedules and teaching procedures, and more research on effective interventions on over-selectivity will hopefully learn us more.
The use of functional analysis has been used effectively to determine the variables that affect behavior, especially problem or challenging behavior. There exists several methods for conducting functional analysis, the traditional ones are based on the procedure described by Iwata and colleagues in 1984. They involves arranging different conditions for persons who display problematic behaviors; social attention contingent on problem behavior, tangible reinforcement contingent on problem behavior, the removal of demands contingent on problem behavior, and a control condition where the person is free to access toys or other preferable activities and no consequences are provided contingent on problem behavior. This procedure has been used effectively in noumerous settings and studies. But this traditional procedure for functional analysis are intrusive and may not be useable as it produces an increase in problem behavior.
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There is a strong and necessary focus on providing education and intervention for young children with autism in inclusive settings. There are a number of reasons for providing interventions in inclusive setting. Some of them relates to the increasing number of young children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders, others are related to the possible benefits of involving normally developing peers in intervention and teaching.
Now Stahmer, Askoomoff and Cunnigham has published a study of 102 children with autism spectrum disorders who participated in the Children´s Toddler School where they entered Read more…
There has been some discussion on Relational Frame Theory (RFT), derived relational responding (DDR) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Based on this discussion I looked up a presentation I prepared for about one year ago. A great inspiration in preparing this presentation was the book Derived Relational Responding Applications for Learners with Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities: A Progressive Guide to Change
by Rehfeldt, Barnes-Holmes and Hayes. This is an excellent book, that should be read by all providing interventions and teaching for children with autism and developmental delays.
In the presentation I also read up on studies involving establishing derived relational responding, and found a comprehensive list of studies. Read more…
Fernell and colleagues have published a new study in Research in Developmental disorders examining the effect of intensive applied behavior analysis(ABA) intervention and non intensive targeted intervention based on ABA for 208 preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders. In this naturalistic study, they did not demonstrate a better effect of intensive ABA intervention measured with Vineland scores.
The effect they found on Vineland was due to cognitive level at intake. This result differs from several other studies on early intervention for children with autism spectrum disorders, and one of the contributing factor to this difference may be the naturalistic approach in this study. Read more…
