Association for Behavior Analysis International

Persons diagnosed with autism often engage in repetitive acts that appear to serve no function; these acts are collectively referred to as stereotypy due to the formal similarity of the acts and the periodicity with which they are emitted. Behavior analysts are often called upon to develop behavior plans addressing stereotypy when it is exhibited with impairing frequency. It is growing increasingly difficult, however, to select from among the many interventions that have been demonstrated to be effective. Therefore, the formal and functional homogeneity of different treatments for stereotypy will be discussed in the context of a full recognition of the formal and functional heterogeneity of stereotypy. This discussion will occur within a presentation of a model for identifying the least effortful intervention for stereotypy that is both effective and preferred by the person diagnosed with autism. The limits of our current stereotypy treatment literature will also be identified and will occasion a discussion of the next generation of applied behavior-analytic research related to the stereotypic behavior of persons with autism.

Using functional assessment techniques, researchers have demonstrated that many of these behaviors are maintained by positive and/or negative reinforcement contingencies. That is, problem behaviors come under the control of social contingencies related to the presentation or removal of salient stimuli in the person's environment. However, to complicate this analytical picture, people with autism also have a very high incidence of health conditions. Recent research findings indicate that the presence of health conditions can initiate or exacerbate problem behaviors. Indeed, it may be that many inconclusive functional assessments are not conclusive because the presence of a health condition (and its associated pain) has not been adequately assessed. An important finding of our research is that health conditions appear to increase behaviors that are negatively reinforced, but may not influence (or decrease) behaviors that are positively reinforced. This pattern suggests that the pain associated with a variety of health conditions may act as a motivating operation to establish noxious stimuli as negative reinforcers or increase their aversiveness, thus increasing rates of problem behaviors maintained by these contingencies. These findings suggest that health assessments and functional behavioral assessments should be conducted concurrently when the temporal pattern of problem behavior suggests a health condition may be a contributing factor. The resulting interventions may then need to target the health condition to alleviate or eliminate the pain associated with it and social reinforcement contingencies that may be maintaining the problem behavior. Therefore, assessment and intervention should be interdisciplinary and multifaceted in nature.

A primary goal of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies is to increase public awareness of behavioral services and behavioral science. To achieve this goal we organize conferences, provide lists of speakers for a variety of venues, accredit world-class behavioral programs, and disseminate text, video, and audio resources on behavioral science and practice. Achieving this goal requires sensitivity to a range of cultural and communication issues that might be solved by a careful focus on our audiences. Many have recognized, however, that communicating to diverse audiences has been difficult for behavior analysts. Performance systems analysis (PSA) has the potential to help us with this focus by identifying accomplishments with the largest potential for improvement, as well as the critical measures that guide our efforts to achieve these accomplishments. This talk will present some ways that the Cambridge Center is using PSA to respond to these challenges. One sub-goal or objective will illustrate this analysis: developing the next wave of behavioral scientists and practitioners. The presentation will address how the Center's marketing, communications, and public relations are changing in response to the consequences provided by populations of young creative scientists who might make future contributions to high-quality behavioral science.

Extending the principles of behavior analysis to education requires building demonstrations of effective implementation for (a) the whole school student body, (b) targeted groups of students, and (c) the small number of students with the most intense needs. To date the hallmark of applied behavior analysis has been success with those students who need the most intense support. Recently school-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS) has extended behavioral practices at the whole-school level in over 13,000 schools. This session will focus on the need to better understand the "systems" variables needed to implement rigorous applied behavior analysis across large numbers of schools. Particular focus will be given to the variables needed to ensure that those students with the most intense behavior support needs are part of the effort to design whole-school application of behavioral systems.

According to the standard view in psychology, sensation refers to the basic effects of stimuli on sensory receptors and perception refers to how we, or our brains, interpret the sensory experience. The term "interpret" doesn't really specify what the individual does, leaving psychologists to infer that perception is a cognitive process. The radical behavioral approach is to examine what someone does when he or she is said to "perceive" some stimulus. Thus, for radical behaviorists, perception is more parsimoniously viewed as behavior (whether overt or covert) under the control of stimuli (whether public or private). In this talk, I tackle the thorny problem of auditory perception, in particular listening to speech and music, from a behavior-analytic perspective. I first distinguish between sensation (as sensory transduction) and perception (as behaviors under stimulus control). I then contend that both auditory perception and imagining involve sub-vocal behaviors and, moreover, that when we report imagining voices or music, we are responding verbally to our own sub-vocal behaviors (self-singing and self-talking). Finally, I describe the results from a variety of brain imaging studies which lend support to the claim that listening and auditory imagining involve sub-vocal behaviors.