An experimental analysis of "spillover" effects on the social interaction of behaviorally handicapped preschool children.
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The effects of prompting and social reinforcement directed to target subjects on their social behavior and that of peers who never received prompting and reinforcement for positive social behavior, were examined. In a combined reversal and multiple-baseline design, three behaviorally handicapped preschool boys who exhibited divergent social behavior repertoires and varied histories with social reinforcement events were sequentially exposed to intervention conditions in order to investigate "spillover" of treatment effects. Prompting and reinforcement increased positive social behavior and decreased negative social behavior emitted by all target subjects. The results also demonstrated a "spillover" effect on two target subjects, who at various times were not under intervention, and on the peers as well. The findings suggest that: (a) the direct and indirect effects of intervention procedures may be enhanced by designing treatment based on the social repertoire and reinforcement histories of the subjects; and (b) the treatment "spillover" effect may be increased by applying procedures to two children at once, rather than at one at a time. (+info)
Interactions between teacher guidance and contingent access to play in developing preacademic skills of deviant preschool children.
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Token-mediated access to play and snacks was made contingent on completion of academic tasks in the Baseline Experiment. This contingency produced stable completion rates that were subsequently doubled, and then tripled, for four deviant children in a special preschool. A reversal design demonstrated that the contingency was functional in maintaining the children's rates of task completion. The Guidance Experiment examined the role of a social event, teacher guidance, in the acquisition of task-completion skills, in a multiple-baseline-across-tasks design (with reversals). The analysis demonstrated that teacher guidance was an important supplement to the token-mediated contingency in establishing significant increases in task completions for a second group of three deviant children in the special class. The importance of teacher guidance was related to the difficulty level of the children's tasks. (+info)
Impaired mirror-image imitation in Asperger and high-functioning autistic subjects.
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Imitation is crucial for proper development of social and communicative skills. Here, we argue that, based on an error analysis of a behavioral imitation task, adult Asperger and high-functioning autistic subjects suffer from an intriguing deficit of imitation: they lack the natural preference for imitation in a mirror-image fashion. The imitation task consisted of a simple movement sequence of putting a pen with the left or right hand into a green or a blue cup using one of two possible grips. The subjects were asked to imitate the experimenter's hand movements either using the crossed hand (e.g., the subject's right hand corresponding to the experimenter's right hand) for imitation or to imitate as if looking in a mirror (e.g., the subject's left hand corresponding to the experimenter's right hand). When people normally view other persons face-to-face, they prefer to imitate as in a mirror, and observation of mirror-image-like movements speeds up performance in nonimitative tasks. However, our autistic subjects, defective in social cognition, did not profit from mirror-image movements of others. These results provide a new insight into the difficulties that autistic subjects face in viewing and understanding actions of others. (+info)
Imitation of nonwords by hearing impaired children with cochlear implants: suprasegmental analyses.
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In this study, we examined two prosodic characteristics of speech production in 8-10-year-old experienced cochlear implant (CI) users who completed a nonword repetition task. We looked at how often they correctly reproduced syllable number and primary stress location in their responses. Although only 5% of all nonword imitations were produced correctly without errors, 64% of the imitations contained the correct syllable number and 61% had the correct placement of primary stress. Moreover, these target prosodic properties were correctly preserved significantly more often for targets with fewer syllables and targets with primary stress on the initial syllable. Syllable and stress scores were significantly correlated with measures of speech perception, intelligibility, perceived accuracy, and working memory. These findings suggest that paediatric CI users encode the overall prosodic envelope of nonword patterns, despite the loss of more detailed segmental properties. This phonological knowledge is also reflected in other language and memory skills. (+info)
Why is joint attention a pivotal skill in autism?
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Joint attention abilities play a crucial role in the development of autism. Impairments in joint attention are among the earliest signs of the disorder and joint attention skills relate to outcome, both in the 'natural course' of autism and through being targeted in early intervention programmes. In the current study, concurrent and longitudinal associations between joint attention and other social communication abilities measured in a sample of infants with autism and related pervasive developmental disorders at age 20 months, and language and symptom severity at age 42 months, were examined. Extending the findings from previous studies, joint attention ability was positively associated with language gains and (lower) social and communication symptoms, and imitation ability was also positively associated with later language. Some specificity in the association between different aspects of joint attention behaviours and outcome was found: declarative, triadic gaze switching predicted language and symptom severity but imperative, dyadic eye contact behaviours did not. Further, although joint attention was associated with later social and language symptoms it was unrelated to repetitive and stereotyped symptoms, suggesting the latter may have a separate developmental trajectory. Possible deficits in psychological and neurological processes that might underlie the impaired development of joint attention in autism are discussed. (+info)
An interference effect of observed biological movement on action.
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It has been proposed that actions are intrinsically linked to perception and that imagining, observing, preparing, or in any way representing an action excites the motor programs used to execute that same action. There is neurophysiological evidence that certain brain regions involved in executing actions are activated by the mere observation of action (the so-called "mirror system;" ). However, it is unknown whether this mirror system causes interference between observed and simultaneously executed movements. In this study we test the hypothesis that, because of the overlap between action observation and execution, observed actions should interfere with incongruous executed actions. Subjects made arm movements while observing either a robot or another human making the same or qualitatively different arm movements. Variance in the executed movement was measured as an index of interference to the movement. The results demonstrate that observing another human making incongruent movements has a significant interference effect on executed movements. However, we found no evidence that this interference effect occurred when subjects observed a robotic arm making incongruent movements. These results suggest that the simultaneous activation of the overlapping neural networks that process movement observation and execution infers a measurable cost to motor control. (+info)
Media coverage as a risk factor in suicide.
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A total of 293 findings from 42 studies on the impact of publicized suicide stories in the media on the incidence of suicide in the real world were analyzed by logistic regression analysis. Studies measuring the effect of either an entertainment or political celebrity suicide story were 14.3 times more likely to find a copycat effect than studies that did not. Studies based on a real as opposed to fictional story were 4.03 times more likely to uncover a copycat effect. Research based on televised stories was 82% less likely to report a copycat effect than research based on newspapers. A review of recent events in Austria and Switzerland indicates that suicide prevention organizations can successfully convince the media to change the frequency and content of their suicide coverage in an effort to reduce copycat effects. (+info)
What imitation tells us about social cognition: a rapprochement between developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience.
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Both developmental and neurophysiological research suggest a common coding between perceived and generated actions. This shared representational network is innately wired in humans. We review psychological evidence concerning the imitative behaviour of newborn human infants. We suggest that the mechanisms involved in infant imitation provide the foundation for understanding that others are 'like me' and underlie the development of theory of mind and empathy for others. We also analyse functional neuroimaging studies that explore the neurophysiological substrate of imitation in adults. We marshal evidence that imitation recruits not only shared neural representations between the self and the other but also cortical regions in the parietal cortex that are crucial for distinguishing between the perspective of self and other. Imitation is doubly revealing: it is used by infants to learn about adults, and by scientists to understand the organization and functioning of the brain. (+info)