Association for Behavior Analysis International

Explanations of complex human behavior, such as memory or problem-solving skills, in current psychological and educational research, rely heavily on explanatory fictions and hypothetical constructs. The concept of joint control (Lowenkron, 1989) provides a rich alternative explanatory mechanism, relying only on the principles of the science of behavior to account for some of these “executive function” skills. Most research on joint control involves teaching individuals to emit echoic and self-echoic responses that preserve a stimulus long enough to enter into joint control with a tact response of the same form. In contrast, Lowenkron and Colvin (1992) reported on a study that used an identity and non-identity matching experimental preparation, thereby demonstrating that the absence of joint control could also act as a stimulus to evoke unique selection responses. The purposes of the present study were to provide a conceptually systematic approach that relies entirely on behavior analytic principles to provide an alternative to cognitive explanations for a ubiquitous everyday “memory task” and to add to the current body of research on the study of the absence of joint control as an independent variable. The teaching procedures, informed by a joint control analysis, were shown to be effective in teaching children with autism to successfully respond to the question “What’s missing?” after having observed an array of items in which one item was subsequently excluded. Future research can rely on these findings to teach important functional and adaptive skills to children with autism.

Understanding complex forms of verbal behavior can be challenging for autistic people, and comprehension of figures of speech like metaphors can be especially challenging. Despite the manifold nature of the processes involved, previous studies have shown that autistic people can learn to respond appropriately to figurative language such as irony and metaphor, and these studies have offered important procedures for use in everyday clinical practice (Persicke et al., 2012; Persicke et al., 2013). Understanding metaphor specifically and non-literal language in general is clearly an important element in a full verbal behavior repertoire. Additionally, the fascinating characteristics of the environmental changes underlying the ability to understand metaphor add an appealing analytical challenge to radical behavior analysis, as well as providing an opportunity to refine assessment and intervention tools. The authors of the present study used a procedure based on the analysis of Joint Control to teach listener responses to metaphors to 4 autistic children and adolescents in a concurrent multiple baseline across participant design. The results of the study will be presented, together with a molecular, moment-to-moment analysis of the environmental and behavioral variables that the authors propose as a possibile explanation of the listener behavior.