| Abstract: Children with autism often have difficulty making eye contact, imitating motor movements, and using vocalizations to request. Research has found that increasing motivation by using child choice, interspersal of acquisition and maintenance tasks, reinforcing attempts, and delivering natural reinforcers in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) treatment programs increase the acquisition time to learn new skills. Nevertheless, some children are qualified as "nonresponders" to these methods due to lack of interest for objects or progress continues to be slow. In this study, 5 children with autism who were receiving ABA intensive treatment, participated in a 2 month intervention embedded into their current treatment program. The intervention consisted of two 15-minute treatment intervals within their regular 4-hour ABA session. The 15-minute intervals consisted of use of sensorimotor play activities in combination with motivational procedures to increase critical skill areas of joint attention, motor imitation, engagement time, and unprompted vocal requests in the context of sensorimotor play. Results indicate that the use of sensorimotor play activities in combination with motivational procedures assisted in rapidly increasing core skills. The results from this study suggest that sensorimotor play may be an important consideration for children with autism of various functioning levels to acquire and generalize core skills at a faster rate. |