Association for Behavior Analysis International

Significant progress has been made toward identifying effective interventions for preschool-age children with autism (National Research Council, 2001). However, because interventions are lengthy, complex, time consuming, and expensive, pinpointing active ingredients that contribute to outcome (e.g., method, dose, timing, content) is essential in order to streamline and increase efficacy. This talk will consider curriculum content on core deficits in autism as one important active ingredient of early intervention. Data from a recent RCT for preschool children with autism will be described in which children participating in early intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) were randomized to receive brief targeted interventions in joint attention, symbolic play or EIBI only. Results of these targeted interventions yielded significant effects on initiating joint attention, and diversity and level of symbolic play. Children were also tested six and 12 months post-intervention. Compared to the control children, both targeted interventions had significant effects on childrens expressive language one year later. Several important moderators of treatment response were also found, including pre-treatment language and nonverbal communication abilities. Thus, these data provide information on potential intervention targets for improving language outcome in young children with autism, as well as information on who benefits most from the specific treatments.

Behavioral Couple Therapy (BCT) is the most widely researched treatment for couples. Developed by Patterson, Stuart, and Weiss, it emphasizes positive behavior change. BCT therapists assist couples in defining their global complaints into specific, actionable behaviors, learning communication and problem solving skills for discussing problem behaviors, and then negotiating for changes in relevant behaviors. Although BCT has clearly demonstrated its effectiveness in comparison to control conditions, many couples do not respond to treatment and of those who do, many relapse. Developed by Christensen and Jacobson, Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy (IBCT), part of what Hayes has called the third wave of behavior therapy, was designed to be truer to behavioral analytic principles and to improve on the outcome of BCT. Specifically, IBCT relies on a functional analysis of couple behavior, includes both private and public behavior, focuses on contingency-shaped versus rule-governed change, and balances an emphasis on acceptance as well as change. In this talk, I will describe the theoretical principles and therapeutic practices involved in the evolution from BCT to IBCT. I will also describe some of the emerging data on IBCT.

The early vocalizations of songbirds and human infants, though immature in form, are similar in function. Producing these early sounds is crucial for the later development of speech and song. The process of vocal development has a strong social component: the responses of conspecifics create social feedback for early sounds that guides the young towards mature vocalizations. I will present experiments demonstrating how immature sounds of young birds and babies regulate and are regulated by interactions with conspecifics. These studies view the infant as taking an active role in its own development and introduce new paradigms for understanding the origins of communicative skills. In cowbirds, Molothrus ater, immature vocalizations of young males elicit reactions from adult females (who do not sing), and this feedback facilitates the development of more advanced forms of song. In humans, playback experiments show that mothers use prelinguistic vocal cues to guide their responses to infants. Vocal learning studies reveal that prelinguistic infants use social feedback from caregivers to build more developmentally advanced forms of vocalizations. Feedback from conspecifics thus provides reliable cues about the consequences of vocalizing. These cues serve to facilitate infants acquisition of the basic building blocks of speech and song.

The farm-bred silver fox (Vulpes vulpes) has been subjected to strong selective breeding for docility for about 45 years at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It is believed that during early domestication, all animals were challenged by the same evolutionary situation that is produced by selection pressure on the specific behavioral traits that facilitate adaptation to humans. This event is considered as a key mechanism of morphological transformation of domestic animals. As a result of the selection for the capacity to be tame, a strain of foxes with behavioral responses to humans analogous to those of the domestic dog has been produced. It is remarkable that the morphological characters of domestication have been acquired along with doglike behavioral patterns. Developmental shifts and neurohormonal changes in the domesticated foxes have been demonstrated. The strong heritability of tame behavior has been confirmed in experimental pedigrees among foxes. A rigorous system for measuring behavior as a truly continuous variable has been implemented. The availability of mapping tools developed for the canine genome has enabled the development of a fox meiotic linkage map and thus the mapping of loci influencing these behavioral phenotypes in the fox genome.

Meta-analysis has become an essential tool for summarizing large bodies of primary research literature in the social sciences. Among the many applications of meta-analysis is the determination of whether a given educational or clinical practice can be termed evidence- or research-based. With a few exceptions, however, evidence from single subject research has not been included in meta-analyses. The reason for this is primarily technological rather than ideological, that there is little agreement on optimal statistical methods for doing meta-analysis of single subject research, and that the methods for doing this kind of meta-analysis have not received the advanced statistical attention necessary to identify sampling distributions for pertinent effect size estimators, appropriate weights, homogeneity tests, and all the ancillary statistical methods such as fixed versus random effects models. This address will review the existing methodological literature on doing meta-analysis of single subject research, identify some of the key strengths and weaknesses of some of these methods, and discuss statistical developments that may improve those methods.