Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) continues to enjoy the most solid research base of any intervention approach for autism spectrum disorder, and Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT), an advanced type of ABA approach, also has an abundance of data to support its effectiveness. Research in PRT began when we noticed that many children didn’t seem to be enjoying the drill-practice format used in early ABA discrete-trial teaching sessions. Moreover, targeting individual behaviors was extremely time consuming, laborious and inefficient. Thus, over the past two decades, we have focused on “pivotal” areas that, when taught, have a widespread positive effect on numerous symptoms of autism.
Philosophy of PRT
Before discussing PRT in more detail, it’s important to mention the underlying philosophies of the approach. First, intervention is implemented in natural settings to maximize the likelihood of producing a normalized developmental trajectory. This may seem obvious to those who read the literature showing that intervention in more clinical, segregated or analog settings results in difficulties with generalization, slower academic gains, less socialization and a greater challenge getting the children on a typical developmental trajectory. However, many families and practitioners are faced with schools and community settings that just don’t embrace the idea of inclusion. It’s often an uphill battle to get a child into (and keep a child in) regular education settings, afterschool community activities and summer recreational programs. PRT emphasizes inclusion—that all children should be educated and involved in environments they would be in if they didn’t have a disability.
A second underlying philosophy relates to family involvement. First, families take an active role in the development of intervention goals and the implementation of procedures to achieve these goals. Intervention is coordinated across all settings, with parents learning, through practice-with-feedback, to implement the procedures. We’ve learned from our research that the procedures need to be incorporated into everyday routines and activities to decrease parental stress and to maximize the normalcy of developmental gains. Assignments that require parents to take time out of their busy schedules to sit down and drill their children actually increase stress and can produce artificial responses. We can’t overemphasize the need to reduce parental stress, which we have not dealt with adequately as a society. Stress indexes indicate that parents of individuals diagnosed with autism experience very high levels of stress, which are very difficult to reduce. This may, in part, relate to society’s lack of willingness to fully include and support children on the spectrum in schools and other community activities. Parental stress may also relate to the difficulties, and lack of proper training and support, in raising a child who is affected by the disability in many areas. And parents of older children worry about what will happen to their child after they are no longer able to care for them. Will others love them as much they have, treat them with respect and dignity, and advocate for them? Our goal is to help families reduce their stress, enjoy full and happy lives with the support of the community, create more positive long-term outcomes and help adults on the spectrum have lifestyles that their parents feel good about.
The third aspect of PRT is identifying pivotal areas of need in children, so that the intervention is more effective and efficient.
Motivation
The first important pivotal area discovered was motivation. Early on, we were working on teaching speech to nonverbal children using a drill-type format in a structured setting with flash cards and a variety of treats (usually edibles) as rewards. While some children developed verbal communication using these procedures, a fair number remained nonverbal and/or failed to show spontaneous generalized gains. Also, we noticed that most of the children didn’t seem happy, nor did their interventionists. At that point, we began a mission to develop procedures for making learning fun. We stumbled across a number of individual components that improved the children’s rate of learning and resulted in better affect—the children (and interventionists) smiled more, seemed more interested and were more engaged during the teaching sessions. The procedures included giving the child a choice of materials and activities, varying the tasks instead of utilizing repeated drills, incorporating easy tasks with more difficult ones so the children would feel a sense of accomplishment, rewarding any attempts the child made, and tying the rewards into the task itself so that engaging in the target behavior would be naturally rewarding. We threw out the flash cards and bought a whole bunch of fun activities and games, which we provided contingently when the child said a word or made an attempt at a word. In a sense, this made the difficult challenge of learning communication fun. Because these new and improved techniques closely resembled the way typical children learn language, we titled our first publication “A Natural Language Teaching Paradigm” (Koegel, O’Dell, & Koegel, 1987). These procedures were far more effective in terms of communication gains, with over 90 percent of young children acquiring functional verbal communication as a primary means of communication. Since that time, the same motivational procedures have been effectively applied to a host of different behaviors in such areas as play, academics and socialization. Because the motivational procedures are effective in so many areas beyond communication, the intervention, which dramatically improved all of the symptoms and the overall condition of autism, was re-named “Pivotal Response Treatment.”
Social Initiations
Since that initial research, we’ve focused on finding other pivotal areas. We discovered another important pivotal area by retroactively looking at tapes of adolescents and adults with autism when they were in preschool. After many years of analyzing boxes full of tapes and looking at countless different behaviors, we found that preschoolers who initiated interactions with their parents had much better long-term outcomes than those who didn’t. That is, the children who exhibited lots of initiations made significantly more progress throughout their lives, often getting jobs and/or going to college, and along the way making friends, having sleepovers, talking on the phone, getting invited to birthday parties and play dates, and so on. In contrast, the children who had few or no initiations as preschoolers were more likely to later live in residential settings, have few or no friends, be unemployed, not attend college, and often be disruptive, aggressive or self-injurious. Following that discovery, we began a line of research designed to teach young children with autism various types of initiations. Our longitudinal data suggest that initiations can be taught, and once learned, can produce more positive long-term outcomes for children. Although this is a new line of research, we are optimistic that initiations can make a huge difference for individuals with autism, and thus appear to be pivotal.
Self-Management
Self-management is another pivotal area we’ve researched. There comes a time in everyone’s life when they have to take responsibility for themselves. For typical children, this may begin early on, and by the time adolescence comes around, kids are pretty independent. Unfortunately, many individuals on the spectrum remain dependent on their parents or care providers throughout the lifespan. Self-management procedures have been effective in creating independence and decreasing the need for constant adult vigilance. To implement self-management for young children, we can restructure the way that we provide consequences, simply by asking them how they think they did before giving them feedback. As individuals on the spectrum grow up, check lists can be developed. Selfmanagement procedures can be programmed for just about any behavior, from reducing repetitive behaviors in full-inclusion school settings, to hygiene, to improving socialization in community settings. Even for nonverbal individuals, self-management can be accomplished by using pictures. Again, self-management appears to be pivotal—when a person can manage his or her own behaviors, widespread improvements in other areas are evidenced.
Responding to Multiple Cues
Learning to respond to multiple cues in our complex world, especially in the context of joint attention, also seems to be pivotal. A failure to respond to multiple cues (also called “overselectivity”) used to be a huge problem when teaching took place in isolated settings. Those settings were so different from the real world that often the kids got hooked on irrelevant cues. But some children, even those who are included, still need work on attention to multiple cues. For instance, when the teacher says, “Take out your book and pencil, and turn to page 49,” the child who only takes out his or her notebook may need to work on responding to more cues. One way of working on responsiveness to multiple cues is to provide them in the context of everyday activities. For example, if the child is coloring a picture, the teacher can put out different colored pencils, pens, markers and crayons, then ask the child to color the house with a brown marker. The child then has to respond to all of the relevant cues. In regard to multi-step directions, the teacher can gradually and systematically work up to longer instructions. When motivational procedures and multiple cues are simultaneously addressed, the children begin to develop joint attention and shared affect, which is important developmentally.
Empathy
A current pivotal area that we are researching relates to empathy. While many argue that individuals with autism don’t have empathy, we disagree. Our preliminary research suggests that the children may have difficulty verbally expressing empathy, but not in having empathy per se. Expressions of empathy are complex in terms of social interaction, pragmatics and linguistic demands. Individuals with autism who are not exposed to (and provided intervention in) natural contexts may have limited opportunities to learn how to respond empathetically. That’s another good reason for inclusion. So, breaking it down, let’s say someone stubs a toe and says “ouch!” In order to express empathy, a person first has to be tuned in enough to realize that something unfortunate has happened. Next, the person has to have the social knowledge to know that a response is desirable under the circumstances. Making a verbal response requires a considerable amount of linguistic information, which may include commenting on the situation and asking a question, such as “Gosh, that must have hurt; are you okay?” On top of that, the appropriate pragmatics, such as a look of concern, is helpful if a person is going to seem sincere. Finally, when the person who got hurt responds, then the whole thing starts over again. It’s complicated, but can be taught. And the results are suggesting that the empathy was there, but expressing it was difficult. We usually start by setting up situations that require an empathetic response, such as saying, “Gosh, I’m in such a bad mood” or “I had a great weekend.” Oftentimes, individuals on the spectrum will make a comment, such as “Oh, really?” or “Oh!,” or they might not respond at all. The next step is to help them learn a response, such as, “That’s too bad; is there anything I can do to help?” or “Wow! You had a fun weekend. What did you do?” These types of empathetic responses express interest and keep the conversation going. Again, because these types of responses make such a difference in social conversation and the development of relationships, they appear to be a pivotal area.
Conclusion
In closing, we are continuing our search for pivotal areas so that intervention for individuals on the spectrum is more effective and less time consuming. Too often, individuals with autism participate in programs that don’t incorporate motivational procedures, so we see a variety of challenging behaviors to escape or avoid the sessions. When motivational components are included, people learn faster, are happier and exhibit much less disruptive behavior, and there are lower levels of family stress as well. Importantly, the children appear highly motivated to engage with others, greatly improving their overall developmental trajectories. The effectiveness of PRT has been documented in published research studies in our clinics and replicated in other independent clinics with a variety of different research designs and large numbers of participants, thus achieving the level of standards recommended by the American Psychological Association, American Academy of Sciences and National Institutes of Health. The goal of PRT is to develop scientifically sound, targeted intervention procedures that children and families find accessible and enjoyable and that result in widespread improvements in individuals with autism.
Reference
Koegel, R.L., O’Dell, M.C., & Koegel, L.K. (1987). A natural language teaching paradigm for nonverbal autistic children. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disabilities, 17, 187-200.
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