Association for Behavior Analysis International

Current theories suggest that mechanisms for language development change over the course of infancy and early childhood. In neurotypical infants, initial perceptual processing mechanisms essential for word learning give way to more advanced social strategies critical for the development of social language. Language intervention for autistic children often leverages perceptual processing by creating an association between a referent (i.e., object or picture) and the corresponding word, thereby promoting word learning. However, this intervention strategy often fail to facilitate social language needed to share information and for interpersonal communication. Recent research suggests that naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions (NDBIs) that encourage early dyadic social interactions may stimulate the social brain networks, thereby improving fundamental social attention (i.e., social orienting and joint attention) and social language in young autistic children. This presentation will discuss the theoretical underpinnings of these claims, emphasize the importance of social language as an intervention outcome, and provide empirical evidence supporting the efficacy of NDBI approaches in promoting social attention and reciprocal social language development in young autistic children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Interventionists who work with young autistic children

Behavior is everything we do. It is the outcome of (and provides the input for) multimodal exploration, perception, cognition, motivation, emotion, and social interaction. With age and experience, infant behavior becomes more flexible, adaptive, and functional. How does behavior develop? In the course of everyday activity, infants acquire immense amounts of time-distributed, variable, error-filled practice for every type of foundational behavior researchers have measured. Practice is largely self-motivated, spontaneous, and frequently not goal directed. Formal models suggest that infants’ natural practice regimen—replete with variability and errors—is optimally suited for building a flexible behavioral system to respond adaptively to the constraints and opportunities of continually changing skills in an ever-changing world. I conclude with a proposal that open video sharing will speed progress toward understanding behavior and its development and improve clinical interventions and practice.

Anyone interested in behavior, development, or the use of video for documentation or assessment.

Over the last decade or so, mass incarceration and police violence have emerged as the center of liberal-progressive social justice discourse and political mobilization in the United States. As such, these phenomena might be considered the twin pillars of carceral-centrism, an interpretive and political tendency in which the pathologies of the criminal justice apparatus are thought to represent the nation’s gravest injustices, if not the wellsprings from which all other social problems flow. This presentation will trace the genesis of carceral-centric thinking and activism, offer critiques of both its interpretive and political tendencies, and consider alternatives. The implications of these alternatives for interpreting social problems more generally and for building social movements capable of addressing those problems will be examined.

Practitioners and researchers engaged with vulnerable populations and social problems of all kinds.

In her 2006 memoir Strange Son, Cure Autism Now co-founder Portia Iversen described the “intact mind” she believed was buried within even the most cognitively impaired autistic individuals, like her son Dov. But the sentiment itself was not new. Emerging largely out of psychoanalytic theory dating back to the mid 20th century, the intact mind was amplified in parent memoirs even as biomedical discourse consolidated in the 1970s around a very different depiction of autism: as a biologically based, intractable neurodevelopmental disorder. With as many as 1 out of every 36 American children now affected, according to the CDC, discourse originally unique to autism has come to inform current debates at the heart of intellectual and developmental disability practice and policy in the United States – including ongoing battles over 14(c) subminimum wage programs, guardianship, and facilitated communication.

Honestly, I think everyone needs to understand the intact mind – from researchers, clinicians and providers, to policy makers, to families, to the general public.

This talk with introduce the emerging field of street medicine – the direct delivery of care to those sleeping on the streets. Dr. Withers teaches medicine in Pittsburgh where he pioneered the work and has led a global movement to establish programs on all six continents. Street medicine has implications for effective care of excluded populations in that health teams are intentionally “woven” into the fabric of those populations, establishing trust and solidarity, allowing for not just healthcare but a shared journey towards social justice. This talk will review the history of street medicine, the unique qualities and values it embodies, the implications for improved care, medical education and how it allows the healthcare system to reclaim its’ humanity and relevance.

Clinicians, administrators, community advocates and learners