Teaching Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder to Mand “Where?”

A modified multiple-baseline design across participants was used to evaluate a procedure for teaching the mand “Where?” to 3 children with autism. The participants were 3 and 5?years old and were participating in an intensive applied behavior analysis program. The participants were able to mand for items they wanted when the items were not in sight but were unable to ask where an item was located. The procedure consisted of a preference assessment for play activities, contrived conditioned motivating operations (CMO’s), prompting the children to mand “Where,” and consequences for correct and incorrect responding. Each contrived CMO consisted of an opportunity for the child to mand “Where” while playing with a selected activity, prompting the child to mand, and reinforcing a correct response by answering the question “Where.” Two of the participants learned to mand “Where” after training with 1 CMO and the mand generalized to novel contrived situations, activities, and the natural environment and was maintained over time (up to 4-weeks), whereas one participant required training with a second CMO before generalization occurred.     

Using Motor-Based Role-Play to Enhance Social Skills in a Nonverbal Adolescent With High Functioning Autism: A Case Report

In this study the authors collected pilot data about the effect of a motor-based role-play intervention on the social skills of a nonverbal adolescent with high functioning autism. Single subject design was used to tally frequency of targeted social skills at baseline, intervention, and 3-month probe. Intervention was delivered once per week in 1-hour sessions over 4 weeks. The Evaluation of Social Skills was also used at baseline and 3-month probe to assess changes in social skill quality. Although the participant's verbal use did not change, the quality and frequency of nonverbal social skill use increased significantly from baseline to 3-month probe (p = .038, t = ?3.556).     

THE ‘EXTENDEDNESS’ OF SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE

In recent years, the idea has been gaining ground that our traditional conceptions of knowledge and cognition are unduly limiting, in that they privilege what goes on inside the ‘skin and skull’ (Clark 1997: 82) of an individual reasoner. Instead, it has been argued, knowledge and cognition need to be understood as embodied (involving both mind and body), situated (being dependent on the complex interplay between the individual and its environment), and extended (that is, continuous with, rather than separate from, the world ‘outside’). Whether these various interrelations and dependencies are ‘merely’ causal, or are in a more fundamental sense constitutive of knowledge and cognition, is as much a matter of controversy as the degree to which they pose a challenge to ‘traditional’ conceptions of cognition, knowledge and the mind. In this paper we argue that when the idea of ‘extendedness’ is applied to a core concept in epistemology and the philosophy of science—namely, scientific evidence—things appear to be on a much surer footing. The evidential status of data gathered through extended processes—including its utility as justification or warrant—do not seem to be weakened by virtue of being extended, but instead are often strengthened because of it. Indeed, it is often precisely by virtue of this extendedness that scientific evidence grounds knowledge claims, which individuals may subsequently ascribe to themselves. The functional equivalence between machine‐based gathering, filtering, and processing of data and human interpretation and assessment is the crucial factor in deciding whether evidence has been gathered, rather than the distinction between intra‐ and extracranial processes or individual and social processes (or combinations thereof). To prioritize biological processes here, and to assert the superiority of human cognitive capacities seems both arbitrary and unwarranted with respect to gathering evidence, and ultimately would lead to an unattractive skepticism about many of the methods used in science to gather evidence. In other words, conceiving of scientific evidence as ‘impersonal’ (or at least not necessarily personal) not only better captures the character of evidence‐gathering in practice, but also makes sense of a large amount of evidence‐gathering that ‘personal’ accounts fail to either acknowledge or accurately describe. Whilst we suggest it is likely that all internally‐distributed evidence‐gathering processes are merely contingently internal processes, a significant number of externally‐distributed evidence‐gathering processes are necessarily externally‐distributed. Some evidence can only be gathered by extended epistemic agents.     

Amplitude Scaling Compensates for Serial Delays in Correcting Eye and Arm Movements

Spatial and metrical parameters of the eye and arm movements made by human subjects (N = 7) in response to visual targets that were stepped unexpectedly either once (single step) or twice (double step) were studied. For the double-step, the displacement of a visual target was decreased or increased in amplitude at intervals before and during a movement. Provided the second target step occurred more than 100 ms before the onset of movement, the amplitude of the subjects' first response was altered in the direction of the new target location. But this amplitude scaling was not always sufficient to reach the new target location, and a second corrective response was required. The latency in producing this second response was greatly increased above reaction time latencies of movements to single-step targets, especially when the target change occurred 100 ms or more before movement onset. These findings suggest that even though serial processing limitations delay the production of a second corrective response, continuous parallel processing of visual information enables the amplitude of the first response to be altered with minimal delay. This enables some degree of real-time continuous control by the visuomotor control system.     

The Interrater Reliability of Subjective Assessments of the Babinski Reflex

The Babinski reflex is a clinical diagnostic tool; however, the interrater reliability of this tool is currently greatly contested. A comparison between rater groups with objective measurements of the Babinski reflex was therefore conducted. Fifteen recorded Babinski reflexes were assessed by 12 neurologists and 12 medical students as being either pathological or nonpathological. Kinematic and electromyographic variables were collected and used to assess which aspects of the Babinski reflex predict classification. Substantial interrater agreement within the neurologist and student groups (κ = .72 and .67, respectively) was shown; however, there were some differing aspects between what neurologists and students used to assess the reflex as determined by objective kinematic measurements.