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  Partner: UNT College of Public Affairs and Community Service
 Department: Behavior Analysis
 Resource Type: Article
 Decade: 2000-2009
 Collection: UNT Scholarly Works
The Development of Interests in Children with Autism: A Method to Establish Baselines for Analyses and Evaluation

The Development of Interests in Children with Autism: A Method to Establish Baselines for Analyses and Evaluation

Date: 2008
Creator: Ala'i-Rosales, Shahla; Zeug, Nicole M. & Baynham, Tanya Y.
Description: This article discusses development of interests in children with autism. Abstract: By definition, children with autism have limited interests. While considerable efforts have been directed toward the social and communication difficulties faced by children with autism, less attention has been directed towards understanding the development and acquisition of new interests. Such understanding may help autism interventionists-establish increasingly diverse and complex interests thereby increasing reinforcing events, learning opportunities, activity participation, and social engagement. This paper describes an observational system for monitoring reinforcer diversity and event engagement during naturalistic teaching portions of an early intervention program. Data are presented for two children. It is suggested that such measures are necessary for two reasons. First, given the lack of empirical support and the importance of reinforcers, there is a need for measurement systems to monitor the development of interests in early intervention programs for children with autism. Second, there is a paucity of research addressing expansion of interests. Developing measurement systems increases the likelihood that evidence-based practices will emerge. Hopefully, these efforts will increase our knowledge, increase child preference for instruction, and open avenues for enhanced instructional and life opportunities based on expanded interests.
Contributing Partner: UNT College of Public Affairs and Community Service
Occipitoparietal contributions to recognition memory: stimulus encoding prompted by verbal instructions and operant contingencies

Occipitoparietal contributions to recognition memory: stimulus encoding prompted by verbal instructions and operant contingencies

Date: August 21, 2007
Creator: Schlund, Michael W. & Cataldo, Michael F.
Description: This article discusses occipitoparietal contributions to recognition memory. Background: Many human neuroimaging investigations on recognition memory employ verbal instructions to direct subject's attention to a stimulus attribute. But do the same or a similar neurophysiological process occur during nonverbal experiences, such as those involving contingency-shaped responses? Establishing the spatially distributed neural network underlying recognition memory for instructed stimuli and operant, contingency-shaped (i.e., discriminative) stimuli would extend the generality of contemporary domain-general views of recognition memory and clarify the involvement of declarative memory processes in human operant behavior. Methods: Fifteen healthy adults received equivalent amounts of exposure to three different stimulus sets prior to neuroimaging. Encoding of one stimulus set was prompted using instructions that emphasizing memorizing stimuli (Instructed). In contrast, encoding of two additional stimulus sets was prompted using a GO/NO-GO operant task, in which contingencies shaped appropriate GO and NO-GO responding. During BOLD functional MRI, subjects completed two recognition tasks. One required passive viewing of stimuli. The second task required recognizing whether a presented stimulus was a GO/NO-GO stimulus, an Instructed stimulus, or novel (NEW) stimulus. Retrieval success related to recognition memory was isolated by contrasting activation from each stimulus set to a novel stimulus (i.e., an OLD > ...
Contributing Partner: UNT College of Public Affairs and Community Service