Future research may allow therapists to know in advance which type of applied behavior analysis (ABA therapy) is most likely to work for any given child with autism.
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shared by Tero Toivanen on 29 Dec 09
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Autism Therapy: pivotal response training | Healing Thresholds - 0 views
autism.healingthresholds.com/...pivotal-response-training
autism therapy Pivotal Response Training PRT ABA Applied Behavioral Analysis
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This study of six children was designed to see if it is possible to predict which type of ABA therapy will work for which child with autism.
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The authors were able to predict which children would respond to pivotal response training, but not which ones would respond to discrete trial training. The authors note that all children were first exposed to pivotal response training and then to discrete trial training and this may have influenced the results. Children who liked toys were more likely to respond to pivotal response training than children who did not like toys.
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This study looked at whether or not a type of applied behavior analysis (pivotal response training) could be used to teach play skills to children with autism.
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shared by Tero Toivanen on 30 Mar 09
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Autistic Aphorisms: Intelligence, Genius, and Autism - 0 views
autisticaphorisms.blogspot.com/...ligence-genius-and-autism.html
aphorisms intelligence autism genius Pythagoras Plato Aristotle Archimedes Newton Gauss Einstein
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Professor James Flynn has incorporated an interesting sidebar into his book What is Intelligence? In it he lists his seven choices for Western civilization’s greatest minds: Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Newton, Gauss, and Einstein.
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Hundreds of research teams, maybe even thousands by now, have so convinced themselves that intelligence must originate from inside our skulls, have so convinced themselves that only within networks of cranial neurons can be found the secrets to humanity’s growing mental capacity, that all have managed to overlook completely the far more plausible alternative—the one existing right before our very eyes.
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It is time to reconsider that conventional wisdom, time to regard genius with a different set of eyes; for genius is not a function of greater intelligence, genius is the description of how intelligence grows.
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Look at the content of any intelligence test—language, arithmetic, patterns, designs. What we measure with the aid of those I.Q. booklets are not the abilities we inherited from out our animal past, but instead their exact counterpart; we measure only those skills the species has been adding throughout all its history since. In some sense, an intelligence test measures the modernness of an individual; an intelligence test measures an individual’s ability to appropriate for himself the same set of skills the species has been appropriating as a whole—skills that do not find their origin in our biological nature, but instead owe their existence to the strange, brewing mixture of non-biological pattern, structure and form that has been rapidly taking shape all around us.
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The unusual characteristics of humanity’s transformational individuals are not the result of their genius, they are genius’s prerequisite
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But counter to prevailing wisdom, there are many autistic individuals—most likely a majority—who do make substantial progress by means of an alternative perceptual course, a course that allows them not only to navigate meaningfully their surrounding world, but also to assimilate, if somewhat awkwardly and belatedly, to the human species itself (and thereby explaining how autism, estimated to be present in nearly one percent of the human population, could go entirely unrecognized until as recently as sixty-five years ago).
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all autistic individuals must crystallize their existence by means of this alternative perceptual course—it becomes, in essence, autism’s most salient feature.
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The unusual behaviors and interests of autistic children—lining up toys, staring at ceiling fans, twirling, flapping hands repeatedly, fascination with knobs, buttons, switches, letters, shapes and digits, watching the same video again and again, singing the same song over and over—these activities betray a form of perception completely unlike that of most other children, a perception noticeably absent in social and biological focus, but also noticeably drawn to symmetry, repetition and pattern.
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The unusual routines of autistic children are the natural, indeed the expected, mode of expression for a form of perception engaged primarily by the structural aspects of the non-social, non-biological world.
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Autistic individuals would have been the first to notice the inherent structure contained in the natural world—the geometry of plants, the isomorphisms of natural objects, the logic of the celestial seasons—only they would have had motivation to embrace such form, only they would have had the need to perceive nature’s symmetry, repetition and pattern in order to form their cognitive grounding.
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We know only bits and pieces about the four Greeks on Professor Flynn’s list, but filling in with the traits from the list’s more modern members, we can reasonably summarize all the unifying characteristics: late- or strange-talking, socially awkward, irascible, obsessed with structure, compelled by form, unusually—not necessarily greatly—intelligent.
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The continuing medicalization of autism, the insistent demonization of autism’s spontaneous effect—these carry the danger of an unforeseen consequence. For the cure of autism will not be the end of a tragic brain disorder; autism’s eradication will not see the passing of a troubling mental disease. The removal of autism from the entire human species will produce only an ironic solution to the mystery of our expanding human intelligence, it will produce the ignoble end to the Flynn effect.
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When confronted by data that runs counter to our accustomed way of seeing things, we as humans have but two choices: we can try to explain the results away, or we can adjust our perception of the experienced world. The former choice paves the all-too-common road of modern academic science; the latter, as described above, walks the more promising path of genius.
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Autism is not a mental illness, not a brain disorder, it is instead the source of humanity’s changing perception of its experienced world; it is, with care and understanding, genius’s fertile soil.