Association for Behavior Analysis International

Teaching complex social skills can often be a bit of a challenge. This might be because there are a variety of factors to consider, particularly when teaching neurodivergent people. Some of these factors include identification of prerequisite skills, effective teaching procedures, and interaction partners. We have three papers in this symposium addressing these issues. The first paper is a review of the literature for visual perspective taking which is a skill necessary to engage in more complex social skills such as empathy and perspective taking. The purpose of this review was to evaluate teaching procedures used in the literature to improve visual perspective taking skills and their effectiveness in generalization of those skills. The second paper is a review of the video feedback literature, a strategy often used to teach complex social skills. Findings from this review can guide clinicians when incorporating generalization strategies into video feedback procedures. The purpose of the third paper was to conduct interviews to explore social interactions within and across neurotypes. The authors identified strengths and deficits both neurotypical and autistic participants. Collectively, these papers have implications for improving both the effectiveness and applicability of behavior analytic interventions for complex social skills.

Beginners

Video modeling is an effective intervention for teaching clinically significant behaviors to individuals with intellectual developmental disorders (IDD). With the social acceptance of interventions moving into the realm of autonomy and independence, self-management strategies combined with a variation of video modeling, otherwise known as video feedback, have increased in use to promote generalized behavior change. Although several published reviews briefly acknowledge video feedback, we did not identify a review primarily examining video feedback procedures for individuals with IDD. Therefore, the current review aims to examine the published research involving video feedback to identify generalization tactics (Stokes & Osnes, 1989) used to assess participants' generalization outcomes. We identified a total of 21 empirical studies that met the inclusionary criteria with findings revealing that most studies incorporated sufficient stimulus exemplars, salient self-mediated physical stimuli, and manipulated antecedents to be less discriminable during video feedback sessions. Also, approximately half of the participants with reported generalization outcomes demonstrated generalized responding near mastery levels. We recommend combining self-management strategies and generalization tactics with video feedback procedures to promote clinically relevant behavior change. The information obtained from this review serves as a blueprint to guide clinicians when incorporating generalization strategies into video feedback procedures.