Association for Behavior Analysis International

One of the objectives of the Behavioral Development SIG is to support young behavior analysts in their pursuit of becoming scientist-practitioners in their professional careers. The Dev SIG established the Jack Gewirtz Student Research Award to promote this value. The included studies collectively explore ways to create opportunities to teach behavioral cusps that promote the development of complex observational learning and verbal operants. The first study analyzes integrating technology to increase observing responses for faces. The second evaluates the development of generalized play of children with autism spectrum disorder.  The third conducts a parametric analysis of the duration of speaker immersion protocol on verbal operant emission. The fourth study analyzes social relations in classroom settings. The findings of these award-winning student studies contribute to the advancement of the treatment of children with autism and related disorders and are relevant to practitioners applying the science of behavior analysis to the treatment of children with developmental disabilities.

The audience needs to have a working knowledge of verbal behavior analysis research, the Naming literature, and knowledge of behavior principles and concepts.

Looking at human faces is one of the most developmentally crucial responses from infancy as it is an important stepstone of social and communicative skills (Gilga & Csibra, 2007). Previous research has found that an absence of preferential attention to familiar faces, face-like stimuli, or voices is a known hallmark of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) (Jones & Klin, 2013). According to the study, attention to face is robustly correlated with autistic symptoms, and with developmental and adaptive skills (Latre`che et al., 2021). Researchers also found that a higher level of attention to face showed significantly better verbal skills in both expressive and receptive language as well as better adaptive skills, notably in the areas of communication, socialization, and daily living skills (Latre`che et al., 2021). Using iPads as an intervention tool for young children with developmental disabilities revolutionized the way in which interventions can be delivered (Kagohara et al., 2013). Paradoxically, however, increased time in front of the computer might negatively affect the quality of real-life social interactions (Sung et al., 2016). Therefore, the key is to effectively transfer the skills learned from the screen to real life. This study is to investigate the effect of an iPad-based face conditioning intervention. We attempt to answer the following questions through this study: First, can we condition adult faces as reinforcers using virtually presented faces? Second, can the established reinforcing value be transferred to live faces and other generalized real-life situation

Researchers have reported that children engaged in pretend play that reflects the conventional activities of their environment (i.e., learned combinations play; Lifter et al., 2022). This contrasts with the pretend play patterns of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), who typically display fewer and less varied play behaviors. Existing research on teaching pretend play to children with ASD often includes prompting and reinforcing scripted responses. These procedures, while effective and efficient, have been criticized for producing rigid, rote play rather than pretend play re-enacting real life events. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of teaching actions with real objects on the emergence of generalized learned combinations play in three children with ASD. Overall, the results demonstrated that teaching children actions using real objects facilitated generalization of those actions with toys. We provide future directions for research when limited generalization was observed with some toys. Additionally, we discuss the implications of automatic reinforcement and the motivating operation in relation to our findings. Keywords: developmental play, generalized play, generalization, learned combinations play, autism, play