Jointly Attend to Verbal Behavior

Following the two part series on Joint Attention, Dan and Mike extend the discussion to include verbal behavior. Dan takes a lead to expand and make an important distinction between verbal and vocal behavior. Herein comes a strong connection with joint attention given that eye gaze and pointing for example, are both fundamentally sound verbal behaviors. While at times we focus on the vocalization or words, we must pay close attention to all communicative behaviors.

Sit back, jointly attend to our vocal behavior and always analyze responsibly.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hey Mike, how do you feel about today? Feeling pretty good about it?

SPEAKER_01: 0:04

I think today's a great day, Dan.

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

I couldn't agree more. Like you say, any day that you wake up and your name's not in the obituary, you're off to a good start. Speaking of which, today's also a great day to start your own podcast. Whether you're looking for a new marketing channel, you have a message you want to share with the world, or just think it'd be fun to have your own talk show, like we did. Podcasting is an easy, inexpensive, and fun way to expand your reach online. Maybe learn something. Now, Buzzsprout is hands down the easiest and best way to launch, promote, and track your podcast. It's what we use. Your show can be online and listed at all of the major places podcasts can be found, like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc., within minutes of you finishing your recording. You know, podcasting isn't hard when you have the right partners. And the team at Buzzsprout is passionate with helping you succeed. Join over 100,000 people just like us sharing their message, already using Buzzsprout as the conduit to get their message across the world.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08

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SPEAKER_00: 1:46

Cheers. Welcome to ABA on Tap, where our goal is to find the best recipe to brew the smoothest, coldest, and best tasting ABA around. I'm Dan Lowry with Mike Rubio, and join us on our journey as we look back into the ingredients to form the best concoction of ABA on tap. In this podcast, we will talk about the history of the ABA brew. how much to consume to achieve the optimum buzz while not getting too drunk, and the recommended pairings to bring to the table. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and always analyze responsibly.

SPEAKER_01: 2:43

All right, and welcome to yet another installment of ABA on Tap. I am Mike Rubio here along with Daniel Lowry. Mr. Dan, how are you? Doing good, Mike. It's been a bit,

SPEAKER_00: 2:54

buddy.

SPEAKER_01: 2:55

It has been a bit. It's been a tough season, right? It's a lot of personal life getting in the way of podcasting and other things, but business is taken care of. Everybody's safe. Everybody's all right. Glad to be here and moving forward. Fresh off our two-part series on joint attention, where we spent a fair amount of time talking about a group of correlates, right? So joint attention, imitation, play, and language. Whenever we say language in development and behavior, then We have to talk about verbal behavior and more specifically things like verbal operants. So I know that given the joint attention work we did, you have come across some new ways to define or maybe look at these verbal operants, some new ways to organize our thinking and structure our programs. So without further ado, I'll hand it over to you and you can get us started on this topic today.

SPEAKER_00: 3:45

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Your bringing up joint attention was really eye-opening for me and led to some thinking. about how we look at verbal behavior and verbal operants, like you said, with the clients that we work with. So let me just quickly define one thing and how Skinner defined verbal behavior and then talk a little bit about my thoughts on how it maybe relates to individuals with ASD and then how from our new joint attention-based perspective, how we can maybe shift things and typify the treatment that we give and take it again kind of out of this Lovaas Lab idea. So first of all, Skinner always defined verbal behavior as any behavior that's reinforced through the mediation of another person's behavior. So that's kind of the perspective that we take on in ABA. We look at verbal as anything that I do that gets reinforced So if I point to the water and somebody brings me the water, that's verbal behavior. If I look at the water consistently and someone brings me the water, that's verbal behavior. If I hand lead, that's verbal behavior. If it results in me getting reinforced. Anything that I do that results in reinforcement from someone else, verbal behavior. So I do just want to establish that. Because historically, I think ABAs typically use this term nonverbal when almost all of our clients are verbal. But we are trying to talk about the term vocal, meaning speech and vocally speaking. So we do obviously have a lot of kids that are nonvocal. I think when we use the term nonverbal, we're actually doing a disservice to a lot of our clients because a lot of our clients are verbal and they are communicating through hand-leading, pointing, signing, crying. All of that, as long as they're doing that and it's getting reinforced by someone else's behavior, is considered verbal behavior. So I just wanted to get that on the table and get that clearly defined as we move forward. Before I get to the second part, Mike, anything you wanted to add?

SPEAKER_01: 5:48

I think that's just a really good distinction because we do so it's fair to say that all of us in our better minds or our daily minds, when we think of verbal, we're often going to think of language and words. And you make a really important distinction here, which is Really what we mean is vocal behavior when it comes to words. And then if we get into the idea of vocalizations, you're absolutely right. Most of the behaviors that stereotypically we get seen as the guys to do the work on are those that are of extreme vocalizations, like yelling and crying. So there's a lot to decipher there and a lot to sort out so that we fully understand, number one, what is communication as we work toward this developmental milestone of using words within a certain recognized language, like English or Spanish or what have you. And developmentally, that is just something that maybe we'll go into later, maybe some today, but really, really fascinating from a brain perspective to think that you know, we're all sort of born and potentiated to speak all the languages, and then from a behavioral perspective, environmentally, we are then restricted to speak only those languages that are more commonly heard by our ears and so forth. So, again, a lot to decipher there, so I'm glad you make that clear for everybody, because you're right. Something that's seen as very stereotypic in ASD, like hand-leading, is actually a super important developmental feature that's communicating something, and I'll go back to this example, but I've been trying to conceptualize with a lot of our staff and a lot of our parents and saying, if your child is hand-leading, think about what they had to do. They were sitting in a certain location. Presumably they had to think about an object, whether it's in sight or not in sight, Consider where they are relative to that object. Consider where their parent is relative to that object, knowing from prior reinforcement that if they take their parent to that location and do some sort of pointing or gay shift, then now they might be manding for that object or maybe tacting or just sharing that experience. But I know you're going to get into that. So, again, I think that sometimes we take that for granted as to– how cognitively rich some form of communication like hand leading is. If we're not careful, we might just boil it down to some sort of early on ASD trait and then miss the point as to how important a feature of communication, something as simple as hand leading can be. So I'm really glad you start out with that.

SPEAKER_00: 8:19

Yes. And also hand leading has to have some level of theory of mind as well, meaning that I want to show you where it is, meaning that you probably don't already know where it is and you don't know why I'm upset, which is really interesting. And we can talk about it in a future podcast that when I was in college, I know the kind of prevailing thought with theory of mind is it comes around four-ish years old for a lot of neurotypicals but there's a lot of research saying it comes like in the twos but just individuals don't have the communication breadth to be able to articulate that they actually do have theory of mind and then circling back on one other thing you said before we move forward excessive communication I like that term I think we should hold on to that and talk about that in the future or excessive vocalization I think is the word that you use excessive vocalization for screaming and yelling because that's actually a really good point if you think about it like that's a vocalization they're screaming they're using the vocal cords to communicate a message so that's really interesting and I want to hold that term excessive vocalization because what we're trying to do is differentiate certain vocalizations to get reinforced to communicate certain items and that's you know we use differential reinforcement for the functional communication training but a lot of kids are vocalizing it's it's almost like if we went to China right and we spoke with somebody who only speaks Chinese, I can say the word ball like as many times as I want, but it sounds like nonsense probably to them, right? And I can communicate it by using hand gestures or pointing or stuff like that. But if I take all of that away and it's just vocalization, it means nothing, right? It's kind of like a scream.

SPEAKER_01: 9:53

Yeah, again, there's so much to sort out there. And you make me think of this right away, and I'll pass it back to you. But we spend a lot of time then thinking about tone of vocalization. And I think we'll probably hit upon some points here where we're going to have to consider level of arousal and how that's related to your excitability and then how that translates into your tone, knowing that as professionals, we're so concerned with the idea of appropriate behavior, to use that specific phrase. that we might sometimes be asking for a child to repeat something based on tone, and we may consider just honoring the communication first and shaping the rest later. Again, I'm sort of getting ahead of ourselves there, but there's a lot to unpack in this topic, so I'll pass it back to you, and let's consider some of these verbal operants a little bit further.

SPEAKER_00: 10:42

Yes, so historically, ABA has always taught verbal operants, and I guess I'll define verbal operants as... ways that an individual engages in behavior that receives reinforcement from another person. So again, pointing, hand leading, could even be eye gaze, using a vocal word, those are all verbal operants which we'll talk about later. But the way that ABA has traditionally taught that is through what's called a functional perspective. And typically, well, anything in ABA has to be functional, meaning that it has to have a payoff. There has to be reinforcement. So for behavior to reoccur, there has to be reinforcement. And if something is reinforcing, behavior will reoccur. So without getting stuck in ABA terminology, there has to be a payoff. Behaviors take energy. If they don't have a payoff, we're not going to do the energy. We're not going to put forth the energy if there's not a payoff. So kind of the prevailing wisdom of ABA terminology Throughout at least my history and my research and my studies with textbooks, both in person and through the literature, is with individuals with ASD, the verbal operands are taught through manding, and manding being requesting. So I say ball, and I receive a ball. I point to a ball, and I receive a ball. requesting. I get something tangible from that behavior. And that's kind of what I guess has been inferred is that communication is a means, kind of a means to an end. I engage in a behavior and then I receive something as a result. And certainly that is functional, but I might contend as we continue down into my third part that that is now kind of untypifying or differentiating individuals with ASD from neurotypical individuals, and maybe that's necessary, but I might contend that it's not, and that actually individuals with ASD might have more payoffs than we want to give them credit for, and it's not just the milk or the ball or something like that. If we can establish joint attention and then we can just have a diverse repertoire of payoffs. And it doesn't have to be taught through a manning perspective. We can add other things, which we would call tacting, which is commenting, intraverbals, things like that. We can have a really diversified repertoire of communication because what has historically happened through this manning repertoire is we've ended up with these eight, 10, 12, 15-year-old kids that speak very robotically and communicate only as a means to an end. I want ball. I want car. And it creates negative relationships with parents and things like that because they're like, my kid only communicates when I want something. And it's just not as dynamic. So that's the second part before I get into how we could get this joint attention piece in. Let me pass it to you, Mike, if there's anything you'd like to add before we move into the third part. I'm

SPEAKER_01: 13:46

just really interested in all the points you're making here. I think, and if I haven't misunderstood, I think what becomes very interesting is that in our better task analysis, we took this prevailing premise and maybe over-enforced it. So we put it first and something that now had to go through some sort of mastery criteria and maybe sort of to the... to the lack of benefit of the rest of the operants is what you're saying. So it's not to say that manding doesn't come first developmentally. It's just to say that it doesn't come first and exclusively first. And in our programming, we may have made the fundamental error of putting it first, but more importantly to our error, putting it first and then putting it through some sort of mastery criterion which prolongs the exposure now of just this idea of manding to the absence of the rest of the operants. Is that kind of fair to say?

SPEAKER_00: 14:45

Yes, absolutely. And that also brings me to, I think, something that's very important and very pertinent and relevant to even some former colleagues that we've battled is the concept of a manding trial. I think ABA has been historically, so, you know, oftentimes goals are written 80% of opportunities across X amount of sessions. What exactly is a manding opportunity? Theoretically, those should be infinite if you're in a stimulating environment. But what happens is because we said manding had to only be for a tangible, manding trials only when I take the phone or I take something, I'm probably withholding it, showing it to you, and having you engage in some behavior to get access to it. What I'm saying is because we've done that, we've essentially demonstrated de-stimulated the environment and said, you can only want one thing, which I'm going to withhold for you until you can have it. But what about my attention? What about mom's attention? What about showing me that something's on the wall? What about jumping up and down? There's infinite amount of things that an individual could want. And by creating a specific trial for a specific stimulus for a specific man, we've made it, we've gone away from the living room and back to the lab of We need, like you've said, one specific SD for one response for one SR. And we've untypified, for lack of a better term, the teaching arrangement for these kids. And then we wonder why they don't communicate, why they don't comment. Because, well, they've only been told that they can communicate when we've presented the antecedent and we've presented the stimulus. Otherwise, anything else isn't going to be differentially reinforced because that's not the response we're looking for.

SPEAKER_01: 16:26

Yeah, that's very, very well put. I think there's going to be a lot to explore here because, again, it's not that we're starting with an erroneous idea. It seems to be the implementation of the idea as a whole over time, which begins to erode. And I like that you're getting stuck on what word do you here I think that for the joint attention piece or some other things that we've talked about we've derived A lot of our commentary from literature about enriched environments, and so we're going to have to find the opposite of enriched because I think that you're, again, you're alluding to something that's very important that may not be fundamentally erroneous in our theory, but for some reason in the way we've implemented ABA in the home at times and trying to preserve the reliability and the validity, we do the opposite of enriching the environment sometimes. And I think you're very right. This pertains to verbal behavior. in a very, very specific way. So yeah, this is going to be a super important conversation. We might end up with a couple of episodes on this here.

SPEAKER_00: 17:30

And I think it was necessary to unenrich the environment, to obtain more of that internal validity, the elimination of confounds initially in the lab with Lovaas, to say, look, I can teach a man beyond the circumstance of chance that I can present an item and a kid can... know what that item is and uh whether it's point vocalize whatever and receive that item but 30 years later the fact we're still doing that the fact that i can put a kid in a playroom with all sorts of stimuli stimulating items and he's not allowed to he's not allowed to leave where i'm at and go play with something else he has to vocally man for the item that i want and can be a little bit of an issue. So that's the first thing I think when we talk about mand. The manding trial, for those of you that are listening, have kids on the spectrum or whatever, I would caution you if your BCBA says a manding trial because that's going to be very limiting from that. Moving forward to additional operants and this joint attention piece. So from ABA, we have to make behavior payoff and we have to make it functional. So again, just recapping, historically in ABA, it had to be functional from manding or requesting, receiving something. I would contend that if we start with joint attention in the beginning and we honor that child's attention or that child's interests and things that they want, not requiring any behaviors, but they're rolling cars, we're rolling cars. We're establishing ourself as a reinforcer. By definition of that, then we become the payoff. And then maybe they would want to show us things because we're not withholding them. We're not requiring them. But now they're going to start tacting. So I would contend that it could be that individuals on the spectrum are more primed or more apt to man. That could be the case. Or it could be the way that we've set up environments and situations that that we've only reinforced the man, and we've never made ourselves the reinforcer. In fact, we've sometimes been the punisher because we come in and we withhold a bunch of items. So why would they want to point to anything in the environment when if they point to it, we're probably going to take it from them? So the more that we can make ourselves a reinforcer, the more that tacting or commenting comes into play, and now we've got a much more neurotypical, for lack of a better term, interaction and situation and learning environment.

SPEAKER_01: 20:08

Wow, that is a super, super rich discussion there. I'm trying to think of where to go next with it. So in essence, again, one of the very typical behaviors that we might be called in to deal with or that might alert a parent, a professional, that something is wrong is going to be something like, prolonged crying, right? Extensive crying. Which is manding. Exactly. You know where I'm going. Sorry. No, no. You know exactly where I'm going here. So a lot of times it would be our better habit currently to go ahead and withhold and withhold and sort of put the crying under extinction under fear of reinforcing it by providing whatever object or whatever tangible. What you're kind of saying is we might want to consider delivering that object a little earlier into the prolonged crying as opposed to waiting longer such that we're truncating that communication to a more brief emission of it. We're kind of doing the opposite right now. We're promoting the extension of that communication because we're not honoring it as communication. We're seeing it as a maladaptive behavior. And I use that word very specifically because at some point I think we're going to talk about how maladaptive behavior, that maladaptive part, we probably need to reconsider that too. So am I getting that right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 21:29

Absolutely, yep, 100%. I think, so I thought of an analogy, hopefully this works and doesn't sound ridiculous, but it's almost like we've set ourselves up to be like, people behind the counter of a fast food restaurant or something, and we'll take an order, and then we'll provide a reinforcement. But if you think about our interactions with individuals behind the fast food restaurant counter, it's pretty much just that's where it ends. We don't go up and be like, hey, do you see the airplane out? Or do you know what happened to my daughter in high school? Or do you know what's your favorite show or something like that? It's pretty much just, hey, I'll take a number three, thank you. Versus your friend is going to have a much more in-depth conversation you know, interaction and communication because you've established that joint attention. You've established yourself or your friend as the motivating operation. So it's much less of going in, placing an order, which essentially communication has been with our kids, has been placing a bunch of orders and we're providing them with reinforcement, to we're now becoming your friend and we care that you... want to show us the color red or that you point to the airplane. And we're going to continue that because we've established ourself as somebody that you want to come and interact with. So I think it's kind of that taking ourselves away from, you know, like you say, the short order cook or the person behind the line and making ourselves just more of a reinforcer and a friend and somebody that they want to come share an experience with. Because right now, oftentimes, we're not somebody that's I mean, we try our best, and I think our therapists do a wonderful job. Oftentimes, we're not somebody that individuals on the spectrum want to share an experience with. And also, that's what people like Chloe Everett have shared as well, that they feel like their therapists have been people that come and withheld and bossed them around and made them do a bunch of things, versus if we establish a joint attention, now the experiences and the interaction becomes motivating and reinforcing.

UNKNOWN: 23:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 23:25

So to bring this back into the joint attention realm a little bit, just knowing that we're fresh off that two-part episode, what we're saying here with regard to some of the things we talked about along with joint attention, the idea of linguistic mapping and contingent imitation. So from a verbal behavior perspective, if you engage in contingent imitation as an RBT, and that child then does that action again, That, in fact, is what we're looking for here with regard to verbal behavior. And the fact that the child is now imitating you imitating them, that's the sign of reinforcement. And, in fact, that would be a beautiful little capsule of intrinsically based reinforcement, which is something we've been after forever with regard to our failing generality in many ways. So

SPEAKER_00: 24:09

let me just continue that idea. So if we don't give them... a cookie or an iPad or something after that imitation, like you said, there has to be something internally or reinforcing between that relationship between us. That's the only reason they would do it. So I'll pass that back to you. But again, talking about the diversity of reinforcement.

SPEAKER_01: 24:33

And you bring up a really good point there, which it would be our tendency right now to say... you know, say in that contingent to reciprocal imitation paradigm, I imitated you, you notice me, now I present an SD, you imitate me, it would be our first tendency to provide some sort of tangible reinforcer after that trial. So we're already kind of, again, this is not that we're incorrect in our theory, but the application of it seems to be, for lack of better phrasing, have become very ASD specific. And not that that's a problem in and of itself, but the more ASD specific it becomes, the more we're actually applying things in contrast to something now deemed neurotypical. And I don't want to get myself in trouble there. There's a diversity amongst all of us from a neural perspective. We're talking about certain behaviors or those behaviors under the dome, right, of that curve. And then specifically now looking at people on the left-hand side of that tail who aren't accessing their environment in the way the general population is. And not that everybody needs to be the same, but again, the more we become ASD-specific with our products and procedures the more we are kind of differentiating a certain population from the greater population so there's a little bit of confusion there as to what's you know deemed special exceptional what is inclusive it gets a little muddy if you think of it that way

SPEAKER_00: 25:52

yeah absolutely it's kind of like you come home and you give your your wife a hug and she smiles well that smile is reinforcing for you she doesn't have to give you you know Something else like a cookie or an iPad. That's Smiler. I know you were part of a band. And obviously one of the reasons bands perform is because they get paid. But a lot of bands perform for free. And why? Because that interaction they get with the audience, the smiles, that energy, things like that becomes reinforcing. And even without getting paid a tangible reinforcement, they would continue to perform. Because that's now motivating. And that's what we're trying to establish through joint attention. How do I make my smile, how do I make my kid, or not my kid, the client that I'm working with, my smile motivating to that kid? without the tangible reinforcers and things like that. And if I can, I would contend that through the joint attention that you've talked about, if I can spend more time making my smile motivating to that client, they will communicate a lot more. They'll do chores. They'll follow instructions. They'll do all of the specific tasks, analyze skills that we want later. They'll do them a lot more if we can invest on the front end on that joint attention and making ourselves more motivating. I see a lot of times too, That parents will say, well, my kids should just clean the house because I want them to clean the house. They should do it because they want to contribute to the house or they want me to be happy. Why do I have to give my kids something? Why don't they just want my parents to be happy? Well, because you probably haven't established yourself as a reinforcer and there's no value in you being happy. to the kid. So that's what we're trying to say is if we can, in the beginning, show them, hey, I can play with your toys too. And look, I can make your toys cooler. And we got their attention and we make their toys cooler. Then there's a relationship. Then the more that we can do that, the more that we're engaged, the more that we can show them that, hey, if I'm happy, I make your toys even cooler. Now there's motivation. Now there's a payoff. And now them trying to please us becomes motivating. And again, it's not trying to please us as in they need to please us to make themselves happy, but it's kind of a reciprocal thing. The more that you can please us, the more that we can please you, and vice versa, because we're starting with pleasing you, so we're not saying you need to please us first. It's we're pleasing you first so that you learn that value. Now joint attention comes in. Now communication, I think, becomes a whole lot more rich.

SPEAKER_01: 28:15

You're hitting upon something that I may have mentioned in the joint attention episodes, but One of the main reasons I was so intrigued by contingent imitation and linguistic mapping is that it forced us to come in and pay attention to what the child was doing and not necessarily come in thinking that we already had every single program templated and ready based on developmental milestones. And again, yes, I'm being a little bit critical of that latter explanation, but with good reason in the sense that we almost overgeneralized and said these are the developmental milestones, again, really trying to fit in this neurotypical realm But again, the reason that I was really attracted to those two procedures that come in conjunction with joint attention is that it forces us to pay attention. If we're doing contingent imitation, you have to watch the child and do what they're doing within reason from their sounds, their facial expressions, their movements. If you're doing linguistic mapping, you have to pay attention to what they're doing. And I think that's something that maybe we lost along the way here, knowing that, yes, we're very, very bright, very well-intended individuals who do a lot of task analysis, but you're beginning to elucidate how we might have put the cart before the horse in many ways based on that task analysis. This is really interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 29:31

Yeah, paying attention and problem solving. Those are, you know, I can't stress that enough. I agree with you wholeheartedly of paying attention and following the kid's lead. And I think that also gives perspective on how verbal our kids are and how much they're actually doing. I ask them to come here and they run away. That's a verbal operant. They're telling me they don't want to do that activity. So the more that we can highlight these things, crying, it's a verbal operant. They're telling me they want something. They're hungry. They don't want to do something. Now, it's not the easiest one to deal with because one behavior could have multiple different functions. You know, you with your younger daughter, when When she was really young, she would cry and you would have to figure out whether she wanted sleep or attention or food, etc. So you have to kind of figure it out. So it's not the easiest. Whereas if I just say I'm hungry, you know, I want food. But the more we can highlight these behaviors, the more I think empowering parents will feel that their kids are actually engaging in. interactive behaviors. They're engaging in manding. They're engaging in these verbal operants. So when we say your kid's nonverbal, a lot of times parents are like, oh, my child's kind of in their own world and they're not communicating. But if they're doing these things, they are communicating. They are verbal. They are manding. Sometimes they might be tacting, but that's a little bit trickier as we've talked about. But they're already engaging in all these man's So I think that before I move back to the joint attention piece, I don't know if there's anything you would like to add, Mike. Just highlighting all of these behaviors that these kids that are typically considered nonverbal are all actually engaging in and the interactive and socialization that they actually are engaging in. And just because it doesn't hit our idea of a social interaction being, hi, Mike. Hi, Dan. How's your day going? That has to be social interaction. And if it's not that, it's not social. Actually, our kids are engaging in a lot of social interactions.

SPEAKER_01: 31:27

So you bring up a really, really, really interesting point for sure. We've almost overly titrated or overly boiled down this idea that if we're going to run a manding trial, there is only... one possible thing you could be manding for and therefore based on that lovely work that Lovaas did we have to repeat this trial for this particular item not considering any sort of satiety that might happen around the fifth trial if you've already received the item five times not to mention the withholding and takeaway part of it and what you're kind of saying is they're probably manding for a thousand things throughout any given session we've just decided that it's one thing that they could be manding for

SPEAKER_00: 32:13

It's that paying attention piece that you brought up, just going back to that, right? We were only paying attention to one specific R response. It had to be, I want iPad. We didn't notice the 50 other things they were doing in that time. That's why language mapping is so important, right? Because we're now linguistically mapping that. We're labeling it, and now we're like, oh, they're... Even if we say you're running away, oh, okay, they're running away. We're bringing it from almost like the subconscious without getting too in-depth there to the conscious, or at least when we label it, now it becomes a thing. It becomes part of the environment, and it brings it to our awareness. So, yeah, like you're saying, that paying attention piece to everything in the environment is really important because we've often said individuals on the spectrum aren't very environmentally aware of but maybe we set that up because we only want them to be aware of one specific stimulus in the environment. We've titrated all they can be aware of to one stimulus, and maybe they're actually really aware of a lot of things, but we're not aware of that.

SPEAKER_01: 33:14

I like the way you put that. So you're trying to set up your session, and you sit down somewhere in front of a table with an extra chair for the child, and you say, here, come here, sit down. And the child runs away. One traditional option is we're going to go physically prompt and wrestle the child. I'm using that word very specifically. Wrestle the child into the chair. Or I like your example, which is, oh, you don't want to come here. You want me to go over there maybe. So now I'm going to go over there. And if you come back this way, now I've got you in the situation I wanted you in, knowing that whether or not you sit, isn't really the important part it's how we begin the interaction now at some point if we do that if we do that iteration you know a hundred times then come here sit down might make sense knowing that you've achieved that at some point and you can actually label it or map it and say hey we're sitting on the chairs and then now I can provide an activity or some sort of reciprocal interaction which becomes the reinforcement I think you're absolutely right we've erroneously identified a lot of tangibles and not that the tangibles don't have a reinforcement value But again, we've maybe erroneously identified those first as the main aspect of reinforcement where it's inevitably the interaction. So even some of the more difficult behaviors that we deemed as attention function, instead of giving that attention in some way, shape, or form to quell the behavior and then restart and get other things going, we've done things like blanket ignoring or just sort of this misinterpretation of extinction where we're not paying attention at all to the communication because it sounds like that undesired sound that is associated with the diagnostic trait somehow, knowing that the child isn't using a lot of words, for example, but they're crying for extended periods of time. Man, that is a lot to cut through professionally and then now for parents, too, who are hardwired to respond to those cries, for example. And when they come to us, they're kind of saying, wow, this has been going on for a long time. This is happening devoid of any sort of understandable wording. And we don't know what to do. So naturally, we come in, do our task analysis, but we might be getting this wrong. We might not be honoring the communication of the cry or the shout or the yell quickly enough in order to address it, and then move forward.

SPEAKER_00: 35:35

Exactly, yeah. And we've removed, because like you said, the blanket extinction and things like that, we've actually removed stimuli from the environment because once they do that, now all of our modeling, all of our communication goes away because we don't want to inadvertently give it attention if it's an attention-maintained behavior. So we stopped doing that, and the longer they cry, the less communication they have, so now there's less communication and less stimulation in that session. So the more, like you said, we could... Say, oh, I'm walking to you. Oh, it looks like you're upset. I'm going to walk away. You want me to walk away. Giving those language models with the linguistic mapping, even at the risk of maybe reinforcing, so maybe they start to look away with that scowl every time. So we're giving some language models, and then we're teaching them that, hey, you can control us with your behavior before we need to control you with our behavior. Okay, you don't want us to be there? Okay, I'm going to leave. You want me to leave? So that word leave just keeps coming in there. We give them the power in the beginning. And even if it's with crying, oh, you don't want to do the homework. Okay, well, I'm going to remove the homework now. Devil's advocate would say they're always going to cry when the homework is presented because that behavior is reinforced. And I'm not saying that throughout 15 years of working with a client, you're going to reinforce that. But at least in the beginning, the more we can show that we can do for the child the more they're going to want us to be there because we've shown that we can meet their needs. We introduced the joint attention piece. Now we become motivating. Now they want to interact with us. Now they want to tact with us. Now they want to follow our directions. Now we don't have parents saying, my kid's 15 and he only does his chores to get Xbox time or he only brushes his teeth to get Xbox time. Why? Because when they were three, we set up this contingency of you have to do for me and then you get a tangible. There was never any value of that making me happy. And why? Because I never made making me happy valuable. It was never, hey, thank you for doing your homework. I'm so happy. Here's the iPad. It was, hey, you did your homework. Here's the iPad. Or, hey, you used your words of asking for the iPad. Here's the iPad. So we lost that whole interactive piece and that whole joint attention piece, which, again, I just want to highlight because I think it's so important that you're bringing that back up. And if we can spend the first X amount of sessions, and it might be longer than we want. But I would contend that it will pay off much longer in the long run. The less demands we have, the more we focus on that joint attention, the more the child wants to show us things, and the more that we show interest in what they want to show us, the more that they will communicate in the end, and the more that you'll have that interaction, which might actually be undesirable, but, you know... It might be like ironically undesirable of the parents that later come to us and say, now my kid won't stop talking all the time. I go on a car ride and it's car, tree, ball, airplane. It's like, yeah, well, you were saying they didn't talk enough in the beginning. And the more that we can have that joint attention, the more you might have that car ride where they're just labeling everything because they want you to know about it.

SPEAKER_01: 38:43

So, man, let me see if I can make... If I can explain this, I've got a really good thought based on what you were describing. So what we're talking here about in some ways is communication, verbal, vocal behavior as a locus of control, right? So you've got a child who's got some delays in their communication. So crying is a pretty accessible way to communicate, better yet negate and say, no, I don't want something. And instead of listening to that cry, We often enforce that demand a little bit more, which completely invalidates that negation in terms of communication. From a developmental perspective, actually, kids do learn to negate before they affirm. Negation and affirmation are both, yes, I do want something, no, I don't want something, which are mans, to go back to that. But in the way you're describing it, we are by and large ignoring that communication in many ways at the beginning. So the child's saying no, and I love the example you're using because it's very hard to conceptualize that, although I think you're absolutely right. A lot of the first sessions with a child who isn't quickly receptive is gonna to be a lot about accepting their negation. You present an activity and instead of having the parent or somebody else prompt them through it right away, the idea is that, oh, you're saying you don't want this. I'm going to honor that communication and move away. And then maybe 60 to 120 seconds later, I'm going to try again. So sort of at the risk of seeming annoying, I'm not going to give up. That's my task. We're here for the next two hours or At least an hour and a half. But we have this concern that by honoring that initial negation effort from the child, that's the way it's always going to be. What you're saying is, no, that's just going to... solidify the negation piece that'll probably bring the level of arousal down towards some more baseline which is going to make the child more receptive and more prepared to then accept the tasks in the future but it's really hard for us to conceptualize that we do you're absolutely right we get stuck on this notion that the moment we honor that communication in that undesired form of crying now that's the only communication that we're going to be establishing and now the kid's going to cry forever but that's just not the way development works works and especially not in the way you're describing the environment that you're that you're constructing which is firstly i'm here to be in your proximity within within your consent whatever that looks like so if you're crying and saying no i'm going to move away respectfully and until you're able to accept me or be receptive then at that point i will start presenting other stimuli and other attempts to communicate with you now at the end of the day We call that building rapport. That's not what we do, unfortunately. But I think if you look up that word, that is what that is. And it's rapport now with a young child who is largely delayed or commonly delayed in their language based on our experience and therefore accessing that cry, which has now become an inherent trait of the diagnostic. So we're trying to reduce that, knowing that reducing it might mean honoring it at first. That's a little bit counterintuitive, but I agree with you 100%.

SPEAKER_00: 41:53

That was a lot of rich stuff there. The building rapport is interesting. It even goes to the occupational therapy stuff that we talked about, how we're the behavioral experts. We're not even the experts on building rapport, and it's funny because I do trainings on that. And I do reasonably well, but there's still people that could teach us on building rapport, and we could work with those individuals to learn how to build rapport so that once that rapport is adequately built, we can add the behavioral strategies in, just like occupational therapy or Or whatever, but yeah, that building rapport. Again, we all say we do it, and I think, at least with our company, we do as good of a job as possible, but we could still always do a little bit better with that. And the other thing that you were saying about not honoring the crying, I think that goes back to kind of what Chloe was saying of that whole masking element of if we come in and the first thing we tell you is we're not going to honor your only way of communication, and if you tell us no, we're not going to honor that know, that's kind of masking. That's like, okay, your voice is no longer going to be heard unless it's the way we want to hear your voice. And that is, I, you know, we'll talk about it later as we revisit some of the critiques of ABA. And I think that's something that we're very cognizant of at our company. But that is a dangerous precedent to say. For me to come in in my first interaction with To be like, unless you tell me this in the exact way that I want you to tell me, I'm not going to honor it. That's a very dangerous, that goes back to building rapport. It's a very dangerous way of, and authoritarian way of building rapport. So I do think we need to be conscious of that, as you mentioned.

SPEAKER_01: 43:36

And again, this only gets more interesting for us because then it, We go back to, and we've alluded to this a few times on the podcast, there's a notion of what ABA is supposed to look like. And a lot of the things we're talking about here, most of the things you're talking about today, would change the face of about what 98% of the ABA out there looks like in terms of this idea of instructional control. You used the word authoritarian. I think that our definition of instructional control in ABA by and large thus far has been very authoritarian. Yes. And it's because we want to come in, and rightfully so, it's logical. We want to come in and we want to take control of the situation. And now suddenly the child is just doing everything we're asking them to do, knowing that, yeah, maybe there might be some masking going on. There's some blind compliance going on here. And while that might make a parent of an otherwise misbehaving child feel good, developmentally speaking, you're saying that's not the most enriched thing we can offer.

SPEAKER_00: 44:35

Yes, yes, I agree. I agree wholeheartedly. And I guess the last thing I'll say on this concept kind of goes back to what you were saying about not honoring an individual's communication in the beginning, is that I see this... Maybe an easier example will be with some of the older clients that we work with. They might not express emotion in a certain way. And because of that, the parents will assume that they don't feel certain emotions. So when the parents do something that may or may not excite the child, the child won't be like, hey, awesome, thank you. The child will be like, okay, thanks, or something like that, maybe in a monotone voice. And the parents will assume the child doesn't feel a certain way. Based on that, the parent will stop doing those things because the parent Thank you. the parent down a whole different psychological pathway of what their kid is and is not capable of doing, and also what they're going to do to get reinforced. Because they don't think that the child's communicating back when the child actually is, so it goes back to that reciprocal interaction, right? They're going to eventually stop doing it because it doesn't have a payoff for the parent. Versus if we can say that, hey, look, your child hand-leading is actually communication, or your child crying, they're actually communicating with you. All of this Well, then I'm not saying that the parent wants the child to cry. I'm sure you've had many sleepless nights recently with a child crying. But once you add the ASD diagnosis to that, And now they're crying. Now it becomes, okay, this is a maladaptive behavior. I don't want to have it have happened. That's all my child's doing is crying. All they're doing is maladaptive behaviors. Now I have a whole different perspective of my child because all they're doing is engaging in maladaptive behaviors versus they're verbally negating. Let's try to reframe that. Let's honor it because that's all they're doing right now. Let's honor it and reshape that only after we've become valuable enough for them to want to reshape it for us, not that we've come in and demanded that they need to reshape it for us.

SPEAKER_01: 46:48

There's a lot of, and I'm going to use this word specifically, hopefully I'm not misusing it, but there's a lot of neurodivergence in what you're saying. And we're also speaking about sort of early childhood approaches here or kind of alluding to those from the joint attention perspective. And I think that that's important to bring together. I hope I can explain this well. But what we're saying is that that divergence from a neural perspective starts very, very early on in ensuring that we're not restricting any mode of communication, but we have to posit those modes of communication from a social interpretation. Man, I think this is probably one of the more philosophically rich episodes we've tried. I know that... I'm sitting here thinking about a ton of things that we're probably going to have to explore again in the future. One thing that you've talked about that we're getting close to the end of our time here, but one thing you've talked about in the past that I found very interesting. is the listeners or the respondents' actions when you're manding or tacting, right? So if a child points at an object and you assume it's a man, so you grab that object and you give it to them, but then the child rejects it, that was actually a tact.

SPEAKER_00: 47:57

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 47:57

Okay, so there's a lot to be learned from that. I don't know if you want to take a few minutes and sort of explore that. I think that's really fascinating.

SPEAKER_00: 48:03

Yeah, because ABA is always externally, environmentally related, so I can never, I can't Get inside of your head. And if you say ball, I will never know with 100% certainty if you were just trying to point to the ball for me or if you were trying to request the ball. So the way ABA has kind of gone about that is basically put it back on the listener and said how the listener responds over time. basically validates or invalidates that being a request so if i provide you the ball and you seem happy with it and again now that we're going back to that emotional thing which i said now what if you were happy but didn't show that you were happy now i might go down all i might think it was attacked when it was actually a man that's getting a little too philosophical so keeping it a little bit more surface level you seem happy i'm going to assume that it's a manned You say ball, and I give you the ball, and you seem unhappy. I'm going to assume it was attacked, or it could have been a man that you wanted the ball to be farther away from you. There's a few different ways, but it always comes back to that listener, how the listener reinforces the behavior will essentially maintain that behavior.

SPEAKER_01: 49:08

And the way you're describing it, it might take a couple of guesses from the listener's part to get it right. Therein lies our repetitive trials, knowing that once we arrive at the correct answer, if you will, the one that the child seems to accept in this case, then now we can replicate that in the future. We can log that away in our brains as to, oh, that's what they meant last time, knowing that there still could be variation. And if we think about the way we've traditionally come in, we've already predefined all of those contingencies from the beginning. So with this discussion, you're really turning things on their heads, knowing that now we run the risk of coming in and not seeing very authoritarian or very in control as we build this rapport. And experientially, we know that there's some risks or some confounds to be faced with that when parents say things like, well, all you guys are doing is playing. And it's like, okay, I understand that because that's not going to help you therapeutically in the face of the tantrum. But at the same time, what we're saying is addressing that tantrum behaviorally is not the only way to address the tantrum. Everything else you're talking about here with regard to communication as a locus of control to preempt the tantrum is what we're talking about. And I'm using tantrum as an example that most parents would want to reduce or most of us would want to reduce, knowing that we've moved away from even using words like that and looking at what people mean by tantrum. And now you're saying all of those pieces are communicative.

SPEAKER_00: 50:35

Absolutely. Absolutely. I guess I'll finish up with two points, and then I'll pass it back to you to wrap it up. But I want to just reiterate one point. So if their communication is based on our reinforcement of the behavior, and our reinforcement of the behavior, meaning that if they say ball and we give them a ball, it's a man. If they say ball and we don't give them the ball, it's attacked. And our reinforcement of is based on their response to our reinforcement. So if we give them the ball and they seem upset, then we're going to assume it's attacked. If we give them the ball and they seem excited, we're going to assume that it was a man. Going back to that level of indifference, that then throws, again, a whole wrench into everything. Because if they seem indifferent to anything, how do we know if they're trying to man or attack? Therefore, how do we reinforce them and teach them the appropriate way historically in ABA, how do we mark that as a manning trial or a tacting trial? Again, I'm contending that it doesn't really matter in this case. But again, I want to just highlight philosophically, I think this will be a great discussion for a future episode about how that level of indifference will get us down a whole different track because maybe they wanted the ball, but they didn't seem like they wanted the ball. So we assume that it's attacked, so we don't give them the ball. They then get frustrated because they actually want the ball, and maybe they withdraw from us, right? Because we're not meeting their needs, especially combining lack of theory of mind, right? Let's say they struggle with theory of mind. Well, mom should know I want the ball because I'm saying ball, but she's not giving me the ball. No, that's going to create a chasm in our relationship because they lack theory of mind potentially. So that gets down a whole different realm, but I do want to highlight that, that I think that indifference and our presumption of individuals' responses by how their reactions manifest is much more impactful into our treatment than we think it is.

SPEAKER_01: 52:29

So you made me think of something. I hope, again, I've said this a lot during this episode. I hope I can explain this cleanly. In your example of manding for a ball, we're going to make the easy assumption that the delivery of that ball, assuming that it is a mand, is the reinforcement. But the delivery of that ball actually makes that mand cease at that point in time. It might make it more likely in the future where, in fact, if you say to that child, no, you can't have the ball, their mand might be repeated, meaning that even a negation of their request is correct. Exactly. That's actually the reinforcement to the communication.

SPEAKER_00: 53:25

And they're probably going to communicate a lot more once they realize that's paying off, right? So the payoff doesn't have to be a tangible. The payoff could be a million different things. It could be you leaving the room. That could be a payoff. It could be mom entering the room. It could be a sound. It could be a bunch of things. The last thing I'll say is, so this has been very philosophical. I hope it's made sense. It's definitely impactful for us on how we implement ABA and how we'll bring it back to our team is what would this look like? So I want to highlight this joint attention piece and what this would look like from an ABA therapist. So maybe things to look for and to look out to maybe not see with your current ABA therapist and questions to ask. So Mike's talked about with a lot of his sessions now, there's no withholding. And I would contend that's a great example of joint attention. So instead of us coming and playing with the kid and seeing the things that the kid's engaged in, which is what kind of historical ABA would be, kids playing with the train. I see he's engaged in the train. I'm going to take the train, maybe have a power struggle, maybe not. Hopefully not have a power struggle, but maybe when he's not looking or something, I'm going to grab the train, have him communicate, and then give him or her the train. What might be better from a joint attention piece is we're playing with something else as they're playing with the train or we're engaging with a stimulus that makes them orient to us. So we're never taking it. We're creating the motivating operation outside of what we need to be more exciting than what they're currently engaging in. And if we can't be more exciting now, than what they're currently engaging in, then we're already working at a deficit. And I would contend that we're probably already losing because then we're operating on a negative reinforcement contingency on you basically want us to leave. So we need to figure out how we can get their attention without withholding what they're currently engaged in. That's joint attention. That will make us the motivation and the reinforcer. And I would contend that would lead to more rich and tacting experience than the more behind-the-desk manding experience that they're getting from a lot of ABA therapists currently. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 55:27

Right on. Well, we've covered a lot of ground, and again, yes, I agree, probably the most philosophically heady episode we've had yet. I know I was struggling myself and stammering and struggling to find the words. I saw you go through the same thing, so I hope this is translating well to you out there as the listeners, again, because this is a super important topic, I think, that has really helped us to dissect the ABA practice that we were traditionally engaged in and has really allowed us to embark on on something very refreshing, very new, very innovative, in particular over the past four or five years as we come upon these discoveries and looking a little less at the behavioral contingency in a sort of singular linear fashion and looking more at multiple contingencies that go on all around an enriched environment and from a more developmental perspective. So just to wrap up here, what's the one takeaway point? You kind of alluded to it at the beginning here. If you are currently a professional implementing programs, a supervisor at BCBA and RBT, you're a parent whose child is receiving programs and you see this idea of a manding trial, what should you consider instead of that? that?

SPEAKER_00: 56:42

Um, and, and enriched environment. And that, like you said, there's always contingencies in the environment, whether they're set up or not. So the child could man for anything. So I'm just going to play and, um, get that individual to engage with me and want to show me something or want to engage in my play. That would be, um, a manding trial, but there doesn't even, it An interaction. Can we just get some interactions there?

SPEAKER_01: 57:11

So we're really paying attention not just to... the vocal behavior, but now the redefined verbal behavior, the gaze shift,

SPEAKER_00: 57:18

the

SPEAKER_01: 57:18

pointing, the reaching, the hand leading, which we might mistake in as a stereotypical or stereotypic feature of ASD, but developmentally it's something that's very rich. It just seems to persist in individuals who may not then develop spoken word, for example, right? So yeah, if I need something, I'm going to go find you who can help me get it, take you to that object, and then find any way to get your hand toward it so you can reach it and give it to me. Again, we might traditionally look at that as something that kids with ASD do, but you're saying, no, that's communication. It needs to be reinforced and then further shaped up toward any other aspect of joint attention or communication.

SPEAKER_00: 57:58

So I would contend that there are almost infinitely amount of manning trials that have happened that we haven't counted within a manning trial. So if I say, do you want the ball? And the kid looks away. That's a mand. That's a gaze shift. The other way, a gaze unshift, right? That's a mand. But that would be considered a minus because they didn't say, I want the ball. But that's actually a plus for them saying, I don't want the ball. So there's so many opportunities. Like you said, I guess the last thing I'll say in reiterating is just pay attention. And we'll talk more about it. But the more you can pay attention, the more you'll... feel so much more empowered about your son or your client, and realize all of the things that they are currently doing.

SPEAKER_01: 58:40

So just to wrap up, we're saying contingently imitate, linguistically map, jointly attend, and pay attention because there's many forms of verbal behavior that maybe we're missing based on our general definition thus far in this game. Absolutely. Always a pleasure, brother. And? Analyze responsibly. Cheers. Cheers. ABA on Tap is recorded live and unfiltered. We're done for today. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. See you next time.