Teaching Children with Autism to Look and Smile While Having a Photo Taken

Orientation and social skill delays common within Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may prevent a child who has a diagnosis of ASD from learning to respond appropriately in photos. In research on teaching joint attention skills, children with autism have been successfully taught to respond appropriately to other types of social stimuli. The purpose of this study was to use teaching strategies from joint attention research to teach three children diagnosed with autism to look and smile in photos. All three children learned to simultaneously look and smile in photos and continued to engage in the response when the reinforcement schedule was thinned. Interest in participating in photos also appeared to be an additional result as all three participants began to regularly mand for participation in photos

Increasing Participation in the Classroom for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Active participation is as essential a skill to children with autism as it is for children without autism, as children are expected to engage in these skills both in and outside the classroom. Without participation skills, children are at a disadvantage when it comes to school and other settings, such as extracurricular activities and the workforce. Recent research has shown that there are interventions available that aim to improve the social skills of children in the home and in the school. These interventions can be delivered in varying forms with the primary caregiver as the interventionist, the specialist as the interventionist, and naturalistic interventions. The purpose of this study was to investigate one of the naturalistic interventions, the Competent Learner Model, and determine its effects on the participation and social skills of students with autism. Three middle school male students diagnosed with autism from a rural northeast middle school participated in the study. They were assessed using the Competent Learner Repertoire Assessments of the Competent Learner Model and the adaptive measures of the Vineland-II and ABAS-II. The results showed improvement for one of the three students and little to no improvement for the other two students

Social and Discourse Contributions to the Determination of Reference in Cross-Situational Word Learning

How do children infer the meanings of their first words? Even in infant-directed speech, object nouns are often used in complex contexts with many possible referents and in sentences with many other words. Previous work has argued that children can learn word meanings via cross-situational observation of correlations between words and their referents. While cross-situational associations can sometimes be informative, social cues to what a speaker is talking about can provide a powerful shortcut to word meaning. The current study takes steps toward quantifying the informativeness of cues that signal speakers' chosen referent, including their eye-gaze, the position of their hands, and the referents of their previous utterances. We present results based on a hand-annotated corpus of 24 videos of child-caregiver play sessions with children from 6 to 18 months old, which we make available to researchers interested in similar issues. Our analyses suggest that although they can be more useful than cross-situational information in some contexts, social and discourse information must also be combined probabilistically to be effective in determining reference.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF #DDRIG #0746251)United States. Department of Education (Jacob K. Javits Graduate Fellowship

The Effect of Teaching Attending to a Face on Joint Attention Skills in Children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism spectrum disorders are characterized in terms of behavioral deficits in areas of social behavior and language development. A failure to attend to the faces of others is the single best discriminator between 1-year-old children later diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and those with typical development. Attending to the face of another provides the opportunity for episodes of attention sharing and is important to the development of communication, joint attention, and social behavior. A more advanced form of attending to a face is joint attention which has been defined as the ability to coordinate attention between an object and a person in a social context and is often regarded as an important developmental milestone. Since children with an ASD typically do not attend to the faces of others, they do not obtain social information provided by the faces of others, as in for example joint attention. Impairments in joint attention are also among the earliest signs of an ASD and, as such, play a crucial role in understanding the deficits in the area of social behavior that accompany the disorder. The current study examined the effects of teaching attending to a face to three children with an ASD aged 26 to 30 months. Results indicated that all three participants demonstrated an increase in attending-to-a-face and following gaze/head-turn behavior during treatment. This increase was also evident in generalization measures, which took place with novel stimuli, after treatment demonstrating that the program implemented for generalization across stimuli was effective

Sharing our normative worlds: A theory of normative thinking

This thesis focuses on the evolution of human social norm psychology. More precisely, I want to show how the emergence of our distinctive capacity to follow social norms and make social normative judgments is connected to the lineage explanation of our capacity to form shared intentions, and how such capacity is related to a diverse cluster of prototypical moral judgments. I argue that in explaining the evolution of this form of normative cognition we also require an understanding of the developmental trajectory of this capacity. For this purpose, the thesis is organized as follow. In the first chapter, I make some methodological remarks and provide the general overview and plan for the dissertation. In the second chapter, I explain what my explanatory target is and why it matters. On the view I am defending, shared intentional psychology gives rise to a special form of psychology that enables us to engage in social normative thinking. These norms are represented as shared intentional states. Moral psychology, in contrast, is more diverse. For moral judgments define a quite heterogeneous class of mental states—although some moral judgments may involve the representation and execution of norms, certainly not all of them do. I show that although much of our distinctive social norm psychology can be explained within the framework of shared intentionality, moral judgments cannot be unified in the same way. In the third chapter, I provide the baseline of social-cognitive capacities that serve as starting point for my lineage explanation. I argue that hominin social cognition was for a very long period of our evolutionary history essentially a matter of low-level cognitive and motivational processes. On this picture, bottom-up affective processes regulated the social lives of early hominins without requiring any special top-down mechanism of normative thinking such as a capacity for understanding and representing social norms. In the fourth chapter, I argue that human-like social norm psychology evolved as a result of the selective pressures that gave rise to shared intentionality, especially the demands that came from collective hunting. Yet collective hunting was not the whole story of the evolution of shared intentionality, for our capacity to form shared intentional mental states emerged from the interplay between the selective pressures that led to cooperative breeding in humans as well as organized, goal-oriented, collective hunting. Thus, I propose an evo-devo account of shared intentionality and its normative dimension since I argue that explaining the evolution of this particular form of normative thinking crucially depends on information about the developmental trajectory of this capacity. Finally, in the fifth chapter, I focus on how social norms are acquired and how the way we learn them gives rise to some prototypical cluster of moral judgments. Thus, this chapter returns to some of themes and arguments of the first chapter by explaining how the distinction between moral judgments and nonmoral judgments can be culturally transmitted

Early detection of autism is key in socializing children before entering the school setting

The project contributes to the significance of special education by providing information on how to identify early signs of autism in order to implement appropriate strategies as early as possible and by examining the effectiveness of early intervention programs. A quantitative and qualitative approach was used to measure the responses of parents and special educators regarding the importance of early detection of autism for early socialization of children before entering the school setting

The understanding of congruent and incongruent referential gaze in 17\u2010month\u2010old infants: an eye\u2010tracking study comparing human and robot

Several studies have shown that the human gaze, but not the robot gaze, has significant effects on infant social cognition and facilitate social engagement. The present study investigates early understanding of the referential nature of gaze by comparing\u2014through the eye\u2010tracking technique\u2014 infants\u2019 response to human and robot\u2019s gaze. Data were acquired on thirty\u2010two 17\u2010month\u2010old infants, watching four video clips, where either a human or a humanoid robot performed an action on a target. The agent\u2019s gaze was either turned to the target (congruent) or opposite to it (incongruent). The results generally showed that, independent of the agent, the infants attended longer at the face area compared to the hand and target. Additionally, the effect of referential gaze on infants\u2019 attention to the target was greater when infants watched the human compared to the robot\u2019s action. These results suggest the presence, in infants, of two distinct levels of gaze\u2010following mechanisms: one recognizing the other as a potential interactive partner, the second recognizing partner\u2019s agency. In this study, infants recognized the robot as a potential interactive partner, whereas ascribed agency more readily to the human, thus suggesting that the process of generalizability of gazing behaviour to non\u2010humans is not immediate