Assessment and treatment of response to name for children with autism spectrum disorder: Toward an efficient intervention model.

Response to name (RTN) is an early developmental milestone, deficits in which are associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study extends previous research by evaluating an assessment and treatment model for RTN with 13 children with ASD. For all participants, phase 1 was a naturalistic social baseline. The 9 children who did not meet mastery criteria in phase 1 underwent a series of treatment conditions in phase 2. In phase 3, treatment components were removed, and generalization was assessed. Results indicated that tangible reinforcement procedures can produce rapid increases in discriminated RTN, sometimes without prompts. The total number of trials to mastery were reduced in the current study relative to previous research. Results also provide preliminary evidence to suggest that the phase 1 baseline condition may produce distinct patterns of RTN that could be used to predict treatment effects and further reduce trials to mastery in future work.

Still Lost in Translation.

Interdisciplinary dialogue can help progress and improve professional fields. Progress and improvement may be impeded by barriers within an interdisciplinary dialogue, two of which are false dichotomies and faulty generalizations. It is our opinion that this particular interdisciplinary dialogue will advance productively by avoiding: false dichotomies about the medical model and Disability Studies in Education (DSE) framework; false dichotomies about using a normality approach to establish goals; and faulty generalizations about practitioners within and outside the field in which we are trained. Most helping professionals care passionately about improving the quality of lives of the people with whom they work. Centering interdisciplinary conversations on this shared value can help avoid false dichotomies and faulty generalizations.

Multiple control responses and resurgence of human behavior.

Behavior that was previously extinguished may reoccur, or resurge, when an alternative response contacts extinction or when reinforcement conditions worsen. Researchers have studied resurgence of human responding in laboratory settings with procedures commonly used with nonhumans. In contrast to nonhuman responding, researchers have failed to observe resurgence of the target response at rates that differ from an inactive control response with verbally competent humans. But this may have been the result of using a single control response. The current study examined this possibility by randomly allocating participants (N = 20) to a condition with either two or four control responses. When the alternative response contacted extinction, having more control responses did not reduce overall responding to control options, and aggregated responding to control options were similar to target response rates. Interestingly, most participants responded more to one control response over all other control responses when the alternative response contacted extinction. This study provides additional support for previous research that finds consistent differences between human and nonhuman responding during resurgence procedures. Two potential reasons for variability in human responding during resurgence tests include less time in experimental sessions and the influence of verbal behavior.

Lost in Translation: A Reply to Shyman (2016).

A recently published article sought to determine the extent to which behaviorism and humanism can be reconciled ( Shyman, 2016 ). However, the "current" conceptions of behaviorism and applied behavior analysis (ABA) used for the analysis were based on mischaracterizations, rendering moot many of the points made. Nevertheless, Shyman (2016) highlighted a very important question we believe all helping professionals should attend to: Should normalization be the focus of therapeutic goals? This response article was written to provide readers of this journal an accurate representation of behaviorism and ABA. We have also offered an alternative approach to answering the question of normalization that uses a behavior-by-behavior approach and individual client values as the deciding factors.

Evaluating resurgence procedures in a human operant laboratory.

Resurgence of previously extinguished behavior may occur when a recently reinforced alternative response is placed on extinction. Understanding the conditions that produce and reduce resurgence is important for both basic and applied researchers. Research on resurgence of human behavior may benefit from methods that facilitate comparison and replication of nonhuman animal studies. These studies often include an inactive control response to differentiate resurgence from extinction-induced variability. In contrast, human research typically does not. Sweeney and Shahan (2016) tested a brief, trial-based procedure that included an inactive control response with human participants, but they did not observe resurgence. The current study extended their methods by examining four different conditions in a free-operant task lasting <1h. Modifications across conditions included changing the number of response options available in each phase and how signals associated with each response were presented. Only one condition resulted in responding resembling resurgence. Our results suggest the utility of the inactive control response and the influence of contextual cues in human research should be investigated further.