Association for Behavior Analysis International

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) present with delays in the development of play skills. This symposium will describe interventions to teach play skills to children with ASD. The first study conducted a quantitative analysis of published peer-reviewed studies that evaluated interventions to teach toy play skills to children with ASD. The second study replicated and extended Pane et al. (2022) by comparing the acquisition of development-matched and age-matched play targets. The authors extended Pane et al. by targeting different play categories, assessing additional imitation skills, and conducting a caregiver assessment to determine each participant’s common experiences and preferences, as well caregiver’s values and preferences. The third study investigated whether visual aids, such as picture cues, were necessary to teach preschool-aged autistic children to make contextually appropriate play statements while playing with playsets. Participants required picture cues to increase their contextually appropriate play statements. The fourth study examined the effects that a linked digital activity schedule had on promoting cooperative thematic play between children with ASD. Participants demonstrated increased engagement in contextually appropriate cooperative play, and caregivers exhibited support for the goals, procedures, and outcomes. Implications and future directions for research and teaching play skills will be addressed.

Board certified behavior analysts or those studying to be behavior analysts enrolled in or recently completed graduate-level work in behavior analysis.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often present with delays in the development of play skills, requiring intensive intervention. Clinicians commonly target toy play skills with this population, and therefore a current comprehensive review of toy play interventions to inform clinicians about empirically-based procedures and to facilitate future lines of research was warranted. The current paper provides a context for behavioral interventions for play skills by first summarizing theories of play and describing play of neurotypically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorder, followed by a systematic quantitative analysis of published peer-reviewed studies that evaluated interventions to teach toy play skills to children with ASD. Sixty-six evaluations met the inclusion criteria and were evaluated across several parameters (e.g., pre-assessment, dependent variable, functional/symbolic play, independent variable, naturalistic teaching components, generalization). A comprehensive summary of the findings is provided, along with recommendations about toy play instruction (e.g., play assessment, toys, play partner, play actions) and future areas for research are recommended.

Deficits in communication and play can affect the quality of life of autistic children. Script training and fading is an evidence-based practice that can be used to teach communication during play. A recent study suggests that script frames can become associated with other supplemental visual stimuli, picture cues. However, fading supplemental visual stimuli can be difficult. If we can associate script frames with other visual stimuli that are a part of the natural environment, such as the toys children are playing with, then fading of supplemental visual stimuli would not be necessary. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate whether visual aids, such as picture cues, are necessary to teach preschool-aged autistic children to make contextually appropriate play statements while playing with playsets. We began teaching contextually appropriate play statements using only echoic prompts. If echoic prompts alone were unsuccessful at sufficiently increasing responding, we introduced picture cues, with attending and echoic prompts. All three participants required the introduction of picture cues to increase their contextually appropriate play statements. Two participants also required pre-session behavioral skills training with the picture cues to meet mastery.