Nesrhtens…..

In the recent issue of The Behavior Analyst, no 32 – 2009, Stewart and McElwee brings up an interesting and potentially important point in describing and reporting research on relational responding; the use of terminology. As with all behavior analytic, and should be with all other research, the use of standardized terminology is a precondition for replication and for applying the research in practice. So it´s an important issue to address.

Stewart and McElwee reviews two papers, Berens and Hayes (2009) and Fin and Harrington (2007), where both studies has been using a procedures to establish contextual cues for generalizing relational responding. But there is according to Stewart and McElwee an inconsistency in the use of term, as I quite agree on.

And I really find it useful to adapt their conclusion and suggestion to a solution to avoid such inconsistencies in the future:

labeling in studies on relational responding should focus on the functional target of the protocol with respect to the behavior of the experimental subject rather than on some alternative feature of the protocol.

This of course not in conflict with investigating different aspects of teaching protocols, but as a mean to uphold a consistent terminology supporting applying the findings and replication.

It´s common knowledge that failure to develop joint attention skills is one of the core deficits for children with autism, and there is a growing body of research addressing this issue, both in the behavioral literature and within other theoretical directions. This research has been successful in establishing response to joint attention, but establishing a flexible and relevant repertoire of initiations to joint attentions has shown to be a greater challenge.

Jones (2009) has in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders published two studies on establishing initiations to joint attention. One addressing the form, and one addressing the stimulus classes.

The first study teached children with autism increasingly more sophisticated forms of joint attention behaviors. Starting with gaze alternating, then gaze alternating and pointing and finally gaze alternating, pointing and verbalization. These skills were established with already established teaching methods outlined in other studies. The second study teached children with autism to respond to more stimuli and to both adults and peers.

These studies shows the possibility to teach an increasingly more sophisticated class of responses, and expand the range of stimuli that occasion joint attention, and adding to the behavioral literature on joint attention. These studies includes two children, calling for more research on this subject.

I have the recent months been trying out a modified version of McHugh and Barnes-Holmes protocol for teaching the derived relational responding involved in Perspective taking. I have included some task from Weiss (2001), but essentially it´s a translated protocol from these two sources. I have also included some extra prompting-steps in the protocol.

The main challenge I have meet in the implementation of this protocol is to determined what prerequisite skills children need to master before starting this training, as some of the children I believed should master the protocol failed at the start of the protocol. So far it seems that these skills has to be mastered before starting the protocol:

• being able to respond with only social reinforcement
• being able to follow verbal instructions containing three steps
• being able to listen to a story, of at least 5 sentences, and correctly answer questions about the content.
• being able to tact most common objects
• being able to respond according to the relational frames of Coordination, Distinction, Opposition, Comparison and Hierarchy.

I quite convinced there are more prerequisite skills, but I´m still in the progress of determining them.

In a recent published study, Murphy and Barnes-Holmes, showed successfully establishing derived mands in children with autism in the relation of more-less. This study is published in Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis.

This is an important contribution to research on language teaching for children with autism. To effectively establish a flexible mand repertoire in children with autism, an approach that needs to directly train every mand that the child requires will not be sufficient. So by developing procedures to teach derived transfer would improve the behavior analytic approach to teach children with autism further.

In this study the researcher managed to establish derived manding with three, e.g four, children diagnosed with autism. And they arranged control conditions that support their findings. Showing that teaching derived manding through conditional discrimination are possible with children with autism.

I have just startet up perspective-taking teaching for a new child with autism using the protocol developed by McHugh, Barnes-Holmes and Barnes-Holmes as described in the book Derived Relational Responding Applications for Learners with Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities: A Progressive Guide to Change (Professional). This protocol is based on Relational Frame Theory and derived relational responding.

I have used this protocol with other children with autism, and the results are really promising, both on the data collected through the teaching sessions, test for Theory of Mind and the clinical picture. But as I experienced today and have on other occasions, it´s a difficult procedure to implement.

Specially when the teaching of several reversed relations start, it gets difficult for the trainers to present the contextual cues and discriminative stimulus in a constant and clear manner. Of course it helps to have prepared the tasks well in advance, but as some children lear fast it can be difficult to hold on.

Anyone have similar experience, and what have you done to ease the effort?