Reciprocal Imitation

In considering traditional approaches to ABA intervention and the importance of imitation as a key building block in learning, you have probably heard the directive (discriminative stimulus) 'Do This' as an essential part of so-called non-verbal imitation programs. In this episode, Mike and Dan take some time to examine the premise of non-verbal imitation, its role in more traditional approaches as well as available adaptations to take this practice from  the 'lab to living room.' Using the procedures as outlined in published research, this brew encourages an update to these imitation procedures toward a more child-directed, play-based feel and essence. So, 'do this'---sit back, relax and enjoy this refreshing, illuminating pour of ABA on Tap.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

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_02: 0:52

All right, all right. And welcome yet again to another installment of ABA on Tap. I am your co-host, Mike Rubio, along with Mr. Daniel Lowry. Daniel, how you doing, sir?

SPEAKER_00: 1:05

Doing great. Glad to be back with the consistency that we were hoping for at the beginning of the year. Good to see you, my man. We're on a good streak. We're on a good streak.

SPEAKER_02: 1:13

Keep it going. So we've got something that's very, very near and dear to my heart today. It's hard to believe that we haven't covered this yet, but we have not. And it integrates a whole... I'm sure we've mentioned it at least 100 times. I can't help myself most of the time. So we did spend some time on joint attention, and that gave us a whole lot of other content to explore, thanks to your great analysis there of those particular procedures. And this is related to joint attention. Also related in a way to our strange technologies episode, I don't believe we mentioned this particular technology or procedure in that episode, but it fits the criterion of something that is almost synonymous with ABA these days. If anybody that's doing in-home intervention and you're doing some level of systematic programming, you've probably said, do this, and then... You know, proceeded to present some model of some action with your motor movement and or an object included. And that's what we're going to talk about today.

SPEAKER_00: 2:20

Well, no one can do anything without the SD. Do this, right? This. Yes.

SPEAKER_02: 2:25

What's this? That. We're going to talk about that today. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. So very, very commonly known as nonverbal imitation, NVI. Again, anybody who's ever done this line of work has heard those three letters, that acronym, with or with, you know, NVI with object, NVI without object. And what it's mainly referencing here is the idea of imitation, which we know is very important

SPEAKER_00: 2:52

in learning. Right. I literally just reviewed a report on Friday. that had that goal and I cringed when I read that goal based on my interactions with you and this concept over the last five years. So very excited to explore it. Also, I know the last week or last couple of weeks, we've done things that were a little bit my soapbox and I was very happy to step on it with the parent training and things of that nature with the product and de-escalation. Very happy to step down, allow you to step on your soapbox because I know this is something that you're very passionate about, brought to our team and we've seen a lot of benefits It's clinically from this. So very,

SPEAKER_02: 3:35

very excited. The things we talk about have become so well integrated in our day-to-day work that you can take the lead or, as you say, get on your soapbox. And I am very, very well familiar with what you're going to talk about. We can just sit back and converse. So I've got sort of a formalized presentation I've done before on this idea of reciprocal imitation, not nonverbal imitation. And they're not unrelated, but we'll explore that a little further. So I do have sort of my formalized presentation, but I'm hoping this becomes more of a conversation, again, given that we've been doing this actively for the better part of four years now. And in a sense, in replacement or as a really strong adjunct or an overwhelming adjunct to the idea of nonverbal imitation. So I'm going to say this now, and I'll say it again. By no means is anybody opposed to the SD do this. We're just going to expand its exclusivity. So the idea that if your only SD for this project These imitation programs is do this. We will land some new ideas for you to do that. And this today, this or that. Right, right, right, right. So before we kick this off or as we kick this off, I want to say that all of this. All of this and that that we're going to discuss can be found in Ingersoll and Schreibman's 2006 publication entitled Teaching Reciprocal Imitation Skills to Young Children with Autism Using a Naturalistic Behavioral Approach and looking at the effects on language, pretend play, and joint attention. And this is in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. And again, back from 2006. So not a new idea. Certainly not something I invented, but I think that what we've been able to contribute to this notion of reciprocal imitation is our own naturalistic implementation. Something that along with our joint attention procedures we've discussed, and this idea of us contingently imitating, doing some linguistic mapping, doing it all under the guise of the motivating operation of play... Now we bring in the imitation part, almost assuring that our clients, the kiddos we're working with, are now jointly attending. So they're actually prepared to sense and perceive the stimulus that... We're presenting in our SD and then hopefully be able to imitate it toward building language skills, building play skills. All these things that we've discussed are sort of a soup recipe, right, developmentally speaking. What I really appreciate about all this is that this is no longer, although it's presented as a laboratory intervention, what we're really talking about here is good, solid early childhood, developmentally based, child-directed, play-oriented practice. So it levels the playing field. I know I'd like to use that mantra here on ABA on tap, but I do appreciate that. So now our treatment is just naturalistic in every sense. We are now just interacting with a child, and it just so happens that this particular child may have so-called deficits in this skill set or that domain or however you want to conceptualize it.

SPEAKER_00: 6:51

Yeah, so... With this process, is this one that we need the IKEA table and chair and blank room to implement? Is it ABA if you don't

SPEAKER_02: 7:02

have those things, Dan?

SPEAKER_00: 7:03

I don't know. That's why I'm wondering. You mentioned it's developed in the lab. In the lab, we have the IKEA table and the chair, and you can't do ABA without it, correct?

SPEAKER_02: 7:13

So if you happen to have that table and chair... Good for you. You might have a nice child-oriented space. Now, let's say that that child is not sitting in that chair. What? You can still do this procedure and not necessarily wrestle them down physically or, sorry, prompt them physically in order to sit in that chair and be able to see these things. So, again, under the guise of the umbrella of play, the motivating operation of play, they can do this if they're standing, standing on their head, sitting, lying on their side. As long as their visual and or auditory attention is maybe focused on you or something else that is lending an SD to be imitated, this can be done. Whoa.

SPEAKER_00: 7:59

Wow. That's amazing. That's amazing. But that would certainly be a minus for the following instructions and the attending goals and things like that. Of course. Of course. No doubt.

SPEAKER_02: 8:10

Ikea table or chair required, at least not for this particular set of procedures we'll talk about today. And again, we joke around. We were speaking facetiously here. Of course, of course. But it's such a standard, and it was such a standard that was so prevalent when we first got into the field, again, to the point of... the suggestion, the premise that we might physically prompt a child to stay in that chair in order to deliver said SD, knowing that there's a bunch of assumptions there that we will be violating today and a bunch of assumptions that we violated in other episodes and saying, you know, we standardize, we analyze the practice of the procedure to look this way, and it doesn't have to look that way. It just has to hit certain key elements, right? So in this case, we're jointly attending. The child is looking and or listening more or less in your direction where you're able to now demonstrate something and oddly enough it starts with the idea of contingent imitation so just to recap what that is this is us as the professionals as the rbts as the bcbas now in interacting with a child and within reason and logic imitating the things they're doing both physically with objects And or vocally. So the idea is you are imitating the child. Why? One reason and, well, actually two reasons. Number one is you can't imitate unless you're paying close attention. Yep. So, yes, I might even ask my staff to put the data aside during this time. I did. I said it. I said it. I might be in trouble. There might be some of you out there. Are we going to miss the trial? We might miss it. A trial. Yes. No. So you pay attention. Put the data aside. You imitate them within reason, right? Sights. Things they're doing, actions, sounds they're making, vocalizations. Sometimes people might feel awkward in terms of imitating vocalizations outright. So I say, well, put in real words contextually in there that match the intonation. So if a child is like, oh, you like that particular toy. Yeah, I like it too. So you're responding, you're imitating, you're matching or imitating some level of inflection there. Sure. As again, at the same time, imitating actions a little bit. So this means if the child walks... toward a certain object, you walk in that direction too. If they crouch down to look at it, you crouch down to look at it as well. Again, everything within reason. You're not going to imitate things that are dangerous or overly exerting onto the surrounding environment that maybe the parents are going to find displeasing, but you're doing your best to imitate their actions. In an effort to make sure you're paying attention, and then maybe more importantly, to make sure the child begins to notice you. They start seeing and hearing themselves back.

SPEAKER_00: 11:05

So what you're saying is we're really focusing on what we're doing, and we're making the therapy dynamic from the RBT, behavioral interventionist, whoever's working with the child's situation. I think so often we... We present the same SD in the same way. So in ABA, we look at behavior as a product of the environment, right? But for some reason, so often we present the same environment and expect a different behavior. We say, touch your nose, touch your nose, touch your nose, and the kid doesn't touch her nose. And then we prompt them, and then we say, touch your nose again. But what you're saying is, let's dynamically figure out other ways that we can get them to independently touch their nose without presenting the same SD the same way every single time. And I think that's really valuable. I said the table and chairs thing kind of facetiously, but I think there's a larger point behind that. And you mentioned the reciprocal imitation comes from just normal early childhood development. And I bring up the table and chairs to just show how far sometimes we've gone, like you mentioned, with strange technologies of ABA from just typical early childhood development. So I wanted to highlight that kind of facetiously, but the underlying tones there, I think, are important.

SPEAKER_02: 12:14

You bring up a really, really excellent point, and I don't know if you intended to, but I think there's a notion of standardization here that we have to credit ourselves for historically, right? Sure. Now... To your point, it was our downfall at the same time. We became so standardized that we sort of lost the elements of ABA or behavior modification somewhere in their better yet learning theory. The idea that, yes, repetition is important to learning. How you conjure up that repetition, though, clearly is going to have some level of impact on the learner's engagement, their satiety, and or their deprivation. The value of reinforcement that might be available to them, given how how motivated they are just concurrently being reinforced by the activity that you're engaged in. And this is where the idea of play as the motivating operation is of utmost importance, right? So, excuse me. We are so systematic and methodological as we should be in the philosophy of science of ABA that sometimes we will task analyze things like play and put them into a sequence. Now, that's not incorrect in and of itself, but the way we were doing it in this sort of unitary, singular fashion, this is the only way this game is played. This is the only way I can present colors to you is through this matching folder or whatever teach style activity might have made its way into your programming. So in that sense, I think we limited the variability, the variety with which we were willing to engage in And then we wondered why generality was a problem.

SPEAKER_00: 13:49

Sure. Yeah. Like you said, we over-task analyze these things. Think of the games that we've taught these kids with turn-taking, right? And we have to break down, well, what do you do? You take a turn, and you say my turn, and then you say your turn, and then you take a turn. And how much time was wasted in playing a game of guess who or Battleship or whatever with every time I have to say my turn, now you get to go your turn, you get to go. And how just... energy how much energy that took for a lot of our clients and now they're not even playing the game because the focus is on the turn them vocalizing the turn taking which is an important skill but like you said because we had to task analyze it so we could you know proliferate it on a on a greater scale to other people and explain it to them in a way that could be easily imitated by those people hopefully reciprocally imitated by those people we lost the whole context of everything we're doing and i think you made a really really good point too when you said using the environment as the motivating operation. That's where the do this, I think, struggles and almost circumvents that. Because now the environment is in the motivating operation. Now the SD is the do this. And we're taking these kids that a lot of times, individuals that a lot of times really lack environmental awareness and maybe go into a room and aren't really pointing out and tacting and things like that. So they struggle with an environmental awareness. And instead of us saying, let's show you all these things in your environment that might be motivating and might spark your interest to then initiate a man with us, we're going to say, no, the only thing you can pay attention to is us and this singular SD of do this.

SPEAKER_02: 15:22

Well, and if you think about how stripped down then the actions became, how decontextualized the idea of this became, so you alluded to it earlier, do this, and now the person's touching their nose as the visual part of that SD or that instruction. Well, what's the purpose of touching your nose? Well, within the context of maybe an imitation game... To hit a trial on an SD sheet. That's about it, right? So maybe if you're talking about body parts, maybe if you were now playing Simon Says, think of the context of a game of Simon Says versus just this blank, do this. Now, while we sort of blend some pretty harsh criticism there, I think it is important to also realize or give credit to why such... a procedure might have been born out of a laboratory experimental setting, right? Well, because you have to standardize that SD, and likely, I can't verify this, I'd have to go back into the research, and some pretty early Lovaas work in the, I think, mid-60s, where I believe most of this stuff comes from, this idea of do this comes from, and what you're trying to do there in standard practice or in a research setting is separate the visual stimulus Now, from the idea of language. Sure. So if I'm telling you the touch your nose and I'm touching my nose and then you touch your nose, I can't necessarily separate whether for some reason you understood the statement receptively or you're motorically imitating my action. Sure. So from a research perspective, separating those two variables is a beautiful thing. What a lovely control. somewhere by just dragging it from that lab into the living room, yeah, we lost a little spark. We lost a little bit of the natural feel, the interactive feel of playing with a child. And now we're running trials. We're no longer playing. So to your point, that motivating operation is lost,

SPEAKER_00: 17:18

right? And that's where the do this, I think, is contextually relevant if there is a motivating operation. And what I mean by that is if I come to you and I'm like, hey, Mike, I need to change my oil in my car. Can you show me And you're like, hey, okay, this is what you do first. And this is what you do second. And you break that down. I had the motivating operation or if I bring and I'm like, hey, Mike, show me how to use this app on my phone. And you're like, okay, do this and then do this and do this. That makes sense. But if I'm just sitting in a room and you're like, do this out of nowhere, then I didn't have a motivating operation to do. to listen to you for whatever reason. And if you're doing that, and historically in ABA, the motivating operation was something completely artificial. I was touching my nose and then receiving the iPad or a high five or something like that. So completely non-related. So those things never contextualized back into anything that was going to be functional for that individual's life. It just was able to give us a target that we could go to an insurance company or whoever and say, yeah, look, this child can touch their nose. Look, do this. And they can touch their nose But like you said, never generalized into anything that was meaningful to their life, and therefore almost a violation of the first dimension of ABA applied in social significance, because they weren't using it for anything socially significant in their life.

SPEAKER_02: 18:32

And it speaks to the aspect of compliance, which I know we've alluded to here in terms of moving away from that whole notion very quickly. That's what it is. We've pre-selected targets for most of these programs. And yes, they're targets that are related to milestones, so they're very logically selected. It's not like we've missed the point. But within the framework, in terms of the motivating operation, again, back to your point, yeah, it's completely decontextualized now, right? And it comes from this idea of a structured approach, which is something that I'll open up the discussion on now and maybe we'll allude to later. We like that. notion of instructional control, the idea that we've structured the session. And what that ultimately means is that as the adult, you're directing all the action. You've pre-selected the stimuli. You've pre-selected the targets based on milestones. Again, not incorrect, but largely decontextualized now because the child has no collaboration, no effort to let you know what they might be interested in imitating and or engaging with. And we use that all under the umbrella of This is a structured approach. And again, that we can make safe, begin to imitate them contingently now towards this notion of reciprocal imitation. And really quickly, what that means is, you know, you're sliding a car back and forth on the carpet. I grab my car. I start sliding that car back and forth on the carpet. The moment you notice me do it, I wait for you to do it again. And then I follow suit. We do that back and forth a couple of times. And then I find my mark and my moment when you're staring at me. And now I make the car jump. Now, what happens if the child doesn't follow suit? Well, you still have the option to prompt. But what I prefer is go ahead and go back to imitating them. And then once they notice you, you come right back out to presenting something they can imitate. Hence the idea of reciprocal imitation. And your favorite part of all here, Dan, is you can actually say, I'm rolling the car. Now the car is jumping. You can use actual nouns and verbs in your

SPEAKER_01: 21:08

phrasing of the SD. And

SPEAKER_02: 21:10

you can still reserve do this for some later, but you can actually incorporate other verbal aspects of the SD that actually label the actions.

SPEAKER_00: 21:22

So for individuals that maybe have a language delay that are learning language, We can actually give them language that might be relevant to what they're doing in that moment because jumping, because do this doesn't mean jumping. So jumping would be much more contextually appropriate than them imitating do this.

SPEAKER_02: 21:43

Exactly. I'll do you one better. Let's say you're, again, for the example with the car, are there other relevant vocal stimuli that would fit in there? What about a vroom vroom? Sure. You can do it. Or a Zoom Zoom if you're Mazda. You can do a Zoom Zoom if you're Mazda. You can jump and go... All of these are now valid verbal vocal stimuli that you can model toward their future imitation. And if they don't do it, I mean, so if a child doesn't do an echoic... Hard to prompt that one anyway without another verbal prompt, right? So you go right back to that dance. So it becomes this dance between contingent imitation, you doing... what the child is doing within reason as you also linguistically map, commentate their actions, your actions, talk about other SDs in the environment. Imagine that. We've said it here before. We're not the only source of SDs in a child's environment. Say what? Even in a one-to-one session, there are sounds and sights abound all around them. Wow,

SPEAKER_00: 22:45

which is probably going to help generality for when we're not there.

SPEAKER_02: 22:47

Imagine that, especially if you can include the parents now in this game of imitation and rolling the cars around and making them do different things. So it's not eons beyond what we've done before, but we're naturalizing and contextualizing the application of imitation, knowing how important it is to learning, and then for our purposes here on the podcast, not knowing that it's being posited after the, or along with joint attention, along with our own imitation of the child's actions and sounds along with our own linguistic mapping all under the umbrella and the motivating operation of play and child directed play at that right so imagine this you spend plenty of time doing this cognitive or contingent imitation on linguistic mapping with a child which makes you pay attention yep you might put the data away for a little while yikes pay attention to the kid and not the data I know it scares some clinicians but I promise as you keep watering that seed something will sprout for you to measure, as I like to say. So that's the idea, is you're doing these active procedures and then waiting for those collateral behaviors to come back such that you can measure them easily. And then, you know, we'll maybe talk about this in a later episode, but the idea that now we can even choose to truncate our data a little bit, ensure that things are happening a certain amount of times, and then put the data away and just make them keep happening, especially if it's interactive play. But they didn't happen if it's not recorded in the data, right? Right, right. So the idea that now you can truncate and say eight occurrences, knowing that we were looking traditionally at eight out of 10 in a given program. You have Right. Well, sometimes 10 out of 10. However many times you want to make it happen, you can make it happen and now put that data aside and just play. And this is very, very relevant to early childhood intervention. I think there is certainly a way to translate it into work with older clients, too. It would look a little bit different. But the notion that you might reciprocally imitate or contingently imitate somebody It's going to be a premise that will apply across the board. You have to be ready not to be socially irrelevant or impertinent, right? If you're mimicking somebody, that could be insulting or a little bit aggravating. Of course. But the idea that you are even repeating somebody's question back or words back to them in an interrogative form, imitating that back, letting them know that you're paying attention to them such that they may pay attention to you in some near future.

SPEAKER_00: 25:15

Yes, that's a great example of authoritativeness, not authoritarianism, as we talked about in previous episode, you brought up an interesting point when you talk about labeling what an individual is doing. So instead of saying, do this thing, oh, you're rolling the car or zoom, zoom or something like that. And as you brought up this kind of fade from nonverbal imitation to reciprocal imitation is how we label things that obviously took a little while to kind of catch on. But I think some of the things that you really when you when we were making the switch, you articulated very nicely is the Well, what exactly is non-vocal about this situation? Because you're giving a vocal SD, do this. And if the child vocalizes something back, and we're always trying to work on vocal skills, are we going to punish the child for that? And if a child has developing language, wouldn't it be better if we actually presented the antecedent that's relevant to the behavior? than some arbitrary thing do this. So I think that was really, as you explained it to me and I started to kind of really understand your thought process there was really enlightening. Another thing you mentioned was the structure and the dot directed and how a lot of times we look at structured and it's almost synonymous with a dot directed. I think this really highlights when we collaborate with schools. I've been in a few IEPs recently, and it's very interesting because I think I see this on two sides of that coin. One is that Oftentimes schools are very structured, i.e. adult directed, and the teacher gives an instruction and the kids have to follow it. So there's not a lot of individualization or following what the kid wants to do, which I kind of understand. And the flip side of this is sometimes our advice is either not applicable or almost taken combatively by the school teacher. Because a lot of times our advice is based on our structure and our adult directiveness, which does not transfer into the school structure or the school's adult directiveness. So again, that just kind of shows how a lot of these environments can be so authoritarian and so adult directed. What I will pass it back to you, and I think further clarification could be useful, is if you could clarify the difference between contingent imitation and reciprocal imitation.

SPEAKER_02: 27:35

That's great. That's great. So contingent imitation, you're going to look at that just from the clinician or adult's perspective in the sense that you're observing the child and you're imitating their actions and their sounds specifically. And again, the two main points for that is that in order to imitate somebody, you have to be watching and listening almost exclusively to them. The other part there is that by imitating somebody, both vocally and or motorically, you can almost assure that they will lend their attention now back to you jointly, meaning they will likely shift their gaze and or auditory attention in your direction okay at which point now you're ready to make the shift into the reciprocity so i'm imitating you and as soon as i think that i've got enough of your visual and or auditory attention whatever might um a better fit the situation am i going to make a sound for you to imitate so the echoic fits in here nicely sure we're going from a coach to tax am i going am i doing now a mortar action for you to imitate Because if it's just a sound, then maybe you don't have to be looking at me. I just have to be imitating your sounds back to you, and then when there's a nice break, I make a change in that sound. So the idea is that by contingently imitating somebody, you get their attention, you notice them exclusively, you get their attention, and then you start presenting stimuli for them to imitate, either vocal and or motoric in nature. So I hope that might clarify

SPEAKER_00: 29:00

that. Yes, so with the contingent imitation, it's almost an echoic. They're rolling the car, you're rolling the car. They're jumping, they're jumping with reciprocal imitation you're presenting novel actions that are relevant to the thing that they're doing but different than what they're currently doing

SPEAKER_02: 29:14

that and i like that you said novel right because it starts with the idea that it's you're doing what they're doing so anything that you present after that could be seen as novel But as soon as they start imitating you, now you've got two actions that you can go back to with regard to contingent and or reciprocal imitation. So I'm so glad you said that because it really builds on itself as opposed to this idea that, again, from a more laboratory approach and an approach of statistical analysis with things like trial types in discrete trial, you might be stuck on roll the car for three months. Right. Right. So this presents a much more dynamic format with which to take actions that the child is already demonstrating in their repertoire and then begin to build that repertoire, knowing that every time you add one to that selection of actions and or sounds, you now have something to go back to, to contingently imitate as you try to present something novel to that repertoire. So I know that there was a lot of back and forth. I hope I made sense there, but it was exciting to hear you vocalize that because that's the whole notion here. And it does. It does take away that... idea of the authoritarianism makes it much more of an interaction in the sense that I haven't come in here with pre-selected targets pre-selected actions I'm looking at you to see what it is you can do and then from that I will take logical steps to expand and vary on those motions or those sounds such that they might already be in your repertoire right so if you're rolling a car you know along the ground the idea that you might be able to roll it up the wall that's right in grasp right crash it into the wall and then how many of us might have picked that target initially without seeing the child play at all? Maybe. People that have a very extensive target list. But then now to think that you're going to implement that into the mastery criteria of trial types, you're going to have a very unenriched, very, very stale environment, if you will. It's no longer play. It's trials. It's drilling.

SPEAKER_00: 31:18

So I think one of the issues with How we've presented these things is that Lovaas did a great job of showing that individuals with autism could learn, of course. And sometimes we look at individuals on the spectrum and say, because they were not able to learn in areas where their neurotypical, maybe as we would call them, peers are able to learn, maybe they have a cognitive delay and need more repetition, more trials, right? That could be one answer. So if their peers learn the color red after the teacher presenting it five times, maybe the kids you work with need it 50 times. Right. Right. Whereas if we could get 80% of their attention right off the bat, maybe we only have to do it four or five or six times and they've got it. So we can still get to the end goal just so much more efficiently based on motivation, based on kind of following their lead versus making sure that we have enough data and enough empirical evidence to say we presented a trial so we can show it to somebody.

SPEAKER_02: 32:46

That's really, really well put. You covered so much ground there. I want to grab onto a couple of pieces. It's For sure, the difference, our insistence on quantification, which I think is very valid, but then taking that into more of a social validity, the idea that If I'm a five-year-old and I'm in a scenario with three, four other same-age peers, I don't have to roll the car 10 times after a certain SD. I just have to roll it a few times and then I'm in the mix, baby. I'm playing. I got some peers. And then all I need to make sure that I can imitate some of the things they're doing, knowing that if I do something cool, they might imitate me while I'm doing it. And that's reinforcing? Could be. Yeah. Very likely, especially if the play continues and you hear, hey, try this. Hey, now you try this. It's a great fade into egocentric parallel interactive play. Exactly. No, exactly. There it is. So that egocentricity you speak of, especially given some of the developmental profiles that we might see in early intervention. Unless you're linguistically mapping and or contingently imitating that egocentrism, you may not be able to procure enough joint attention with gay shift, for example, in order to successfully and contextually achieve imitation in a way that's socially significant. And again, the best way to do that is play, especially for young kids. I would say that for anybody, actually. Anybody learning a new task sure the moment it feels like work your motivation dwindles a little bit sure if it just feels like play man, you'll do it over and over and over and over again. So this idea of play as a motivating operation and then the reciprocity and the reinforcement, the natural reinforcement that comes from, say, moving in unison with somebody if you're dancing or even if you're watching the Super Bowl halftime show and there's a bunch of synchrony with the dancers. Everybody can find natural reinforcement, interest, engagement in that idea of imitation and that's all we're basically talking about here is synchrony with somebody else. It goes a long way socially

SPEAKER_00: 34:51

you bring up an interesting point with play as we're recording in your son's room who I got to meet or got to say hi to a little bit earlier right before we recorded you know he's big into music and into the guitar and drums and if you're trying to get a kid interested in the drums you probably just want to give him some drumsticks and some drums and let him beat on the drums a little bit or strum the guitar and say oh you like that can I show you this and this if I try to give him a sheet of music and a guitar the first time and say okay we're going to play this note and this note And this note, probably not going to have an individual that's very motivated by it. Maybe if they have the diligence and the perseverance to stick through and then they can see what all of those notes amount to at the end, then they'll stay with it. But I think just like you said, playing in the beginning and then kind of going from that is just going to be that much more effective. You also mentioned something else. You mentioned a kid being in the mix and playing with the reciprocal imitation. I think you might have added something new to your mix a little bit recently that might have attributed to even your increased sharpness in this reciprocal imitation. All right. Well, thank you, Mr. Dan. You're looking at my little bottle over here. Your

SPEAKER_02: 36:03

empty bottle. Let's talk about mental clarity and its importance toward productivity. It seems like everyone desperately wants to do more to be more efficient. At least that's what I'm always hearing people talk about. especially on their way for that sugar-laden caffeine fix at the corner coffee shop. Somehow that extra dose of caffeine, that second wind in the late afternoon, is what people are always after. So I'm going to introduce you to a little elixir that has helped me launch into every day and avoid the late afternoon crash. It's called Magic Mind, and you've alluded to it here before a couple episodes ago. It's the perfect brew to have on tap for my mental clarity and acuity. Now don't get me wrong, it has has not replaced my morning coffee, but it has assured that I can keep it to one cup of joe and still have all the mental performance, power, and alertness that I need. If you're like me, even when you're doing your best to concentrate on creating content or developing programming for clients, managing the family routine and transportation schedule, trying to get a little exercise into the mix, you're not always 100% focused and you're not always getting everything done as quickly and as efficiently as you need to. Again, I have found what I think is the perfect solution. In fact, I'm lucky enough to say that Magic Mind found me and now it's my go-to before recording ABA on tap or simply managing the daily grind. I've been trying to find a way to keep my energy level steady throughout the day and coffee on its own just wasn't cutting it. Thankfully, I found this little shot of brain boosting magic.

SPEAKER_00: 37:38

We've definitely added Magic Mind to the tap. It's on tap now. So

SPEAKER_02: 37:43

consistently creating new content here for the tap isn't easy. It requires a lot of focus, a lot of energy. It can be hard to balance those two things. Too much energy and you feel amped up and ready to bounce off the walls instead of feeling dialed in. Magic Mind is soothing and bright and quickly refreshing. I can literally feel an invigorating surge as I take the first sip of this powerful elixir. Being a parent, Dan, takes a lot. And I haven't found anything that gives me energy without making me crash at some point. Again, love my coffee, but that's what it does. Since I've started using Magic Mind, I'm able to keep my energy while not overloading on coffee and getting that uneasiness in my stomach. In fact, my family has witnessed such an improvement to my mental performance and overall mood that my teenagers have begun to enjoy the benefits of Magic Mind as well. And I feel good knowing they're consuming good stuff, some matcha, some honey, and a whole lot of magic in the form of adaptogens and nootropics and mushroom-based ingredients. ingredients. So if you want to boost your brain performance, your memory, your mental acuity, your alertness, try Magic Mind today. In fact, please do look at the episode description to find the link with a discount toward your prospective purchase. I hope you try Magic Mind and enjoy the benefits that I've discovered. Thanks for that time, sir.

SPEAKER_00: 39:05

Absolutely. And that's Magic Mind, M-I-N-D, not Magic Mike. That will lead you into something slightly different.

SPEAKER_02: 39:12

Yeah, that Channing Tatum guy, he probably wouldn't appreciate that. I'd be stealing some of his thunder.

SPEAKER_00: 39:19

Absolutely. Speaking of stealing thunder, I don't want to steal more of your thunder, so back to the reciprocal imitation piece.

SPEAKER_02: 39:27

All right, so let's jump right into the lab procedure. Let's describe this a little bit from the literature, and then we can talk about some of the ways... Or from there, we'll see what organic conversation comes from now, taking this into the living room. And this is actually a really friendly procedure that was created. And I think that largely, if you start taking some of the prompting away and continue some of the modeling, that's one really good way in which you can deviate from the procedure, but still preserve it enough to know that the empirical validation remains on your side. Again, this is from Ingersoll and Schreibman in 2006. They conducted baseline sessions. These were free, open-ended, child-directed play situations with a therapist. Every minute on average, the therapist modeled an action with a toy paired with a verbal marker. Each action was modeled three times. Twenty different actions per session were attempted. So you can see here already the deviation from... Some sort of target-based mastery criterion, target by target approach, right? You're enriching the environment. Each model was kept the same in terms of its verbal marker, but varied across trials. Now, what I mean by that is if the action was to roll a car, the verbal marker could be roll the car one trial and vroom, vroom the next time. And so on. Generality. From the beginning, right? That's the beauty of this. From the beginning, along with joint attention, what you're really doing is you're opening up the level, the idea of gay shift and attending to the entire environment, not just the SD typically being presented right in front of them.

SPEAKER_00: 41:05

So we could say roll the car or make your wheel spin or push it forward, any of those

SPEAKER_02: 41:10

things. Any of that. Make it go fast, fast, fast, fast. Any of those things that are play-oriented speech now become available to you. Not just, I want roll car. Right. Right. Oh, man. That's the next episode, right? The dangers of I want, I see. Those are the only two first-person declaratives in the ABA autistic vocabulary. I want and I see. That's it. And more in open. But we already hit more. More. Do this. Definitely strange technologies. So the effort here is to ensure and gain the child's attention by getting into the line of sight and or using the child's name. So I know we've talked about this a little bit here. One of the things that we did, professionally speaking, with the joint attention piece is we removed response to name programs. Now the name was a very important target under responding to auditory stimuli or, more importantly, shifting gaze to auditory stimuli. And we're very, very systematic about that, sort of trying to make it happen behind the child so that that gaze shift is very, very overt. Same thing here, as you're doing your modeling and you're saying your words, you're trying to crouch down into that line of sight. The idea is that you're pairing your sound with their sights. They can take you in all at once, within reason, right? You've got to stay polite. You've got to stay... you know, amenable to the situation, not be awkward, but you're really doing everything to gain that visual attention along with your verbal marker.

SPEAKER_00: 42:39

So you're going into their line of sight. You're not prompting them to look at you.

SPEAKER_02: 42:43

Imagine that. Okay. Yep. That's, that's one of those things that I can think back, uh, early in my career and it makes me cringe because I know that I was involved in some similar procedure at some point with a RTN program, right?

SPEAKER_00: 42:56

Yep. Every day we're just trying to get better, a little more humanistic, a little more, um, compassionate.

SPEAKER_02: 43:01

Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Well, Well, you alluded to Lovaas in the early days a little bit earlier and the idea that he sort of opened up the playing field to say this demographic can also learn. Sure. Quickly implies and very correctly implies that before that, the general social notion was that that demographic could not learn. So there's a lot of progress to be understood there, historically, contextually, and yes, we try to move forward every single day. So lastly, in terms of the lab procedure, no feedback was provided. in response to the child's subsequent behavior. So if the child did an action, then you would simply imitate that action or try to now change the action accordingly so there was no good job or try again as a result to anything they did because outside of maybe throwing the car or doing something dangerous, is there anything that's disallowed in play play should be pretty open-ended again within certain parameters of safety and um and preservation

SPEAKER_00: 44:04

so when you say no feedback was provided what would the rbt or what was this individual doing in response to the child's behavior

SPEAKER_02: 44:12

imitating back right so continuing to imitate the child's um actions toward trying to get them to understand the model they were presenting and then maybe imitate it back.

SPEAKER_00: 44:23

And creating maybe more novel things for them to do as well that were relevant.

SPEAKER_02: 44:27

So 20 different variations had to be presented, and those sometimes had two to three different verbal markers.

SPEAKER_00: 44:33

So I think this is one area that we maybe lose some case managers sometimes is the... they really like having some targets listed down so that they can assure that those targets will be hit. If they're not specifically listed down, then there's a little bit of trust that they have to put into the therapist that they're going to hit a substantial or whatever acceptable number of targets, whether it's the roll or the jump or things like that. There's a level of faith that has to be put into there if they're not specifically task analyzed down there. I don't know if you have anything you wanted to say regarding that.

SPEAKER_02: 45:10

That's a very important quandary to mention. I think that my best suggestion to that is, yes, go ahead and predetermine some actions that might seem contextually appropriate to the play. that you want to direct. And actually, I'm circling back to that idea of adult-directed target specificity, the idea that I can make a direct line between something we were doing repetitively and now something the child is expressing or emitting behaviorally. So that's a really good question you're asking. Again, my best suggestion would be start with your predetermined adult-directed targets. Be ready to add to that list based on what the therapist and or you're seeing from that child in response. So that way, something that's within reason in rolling or playing with a car never becomes a try again. It just becomes something that you contingently imitate towards expanding that repertoire of actions that can now be imitated.

SPEAKER_00: 46:03

Thank you. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You know, in the lab, I think it makes a lot more sense to have specific targets to make sure a child can be taught X, Y, and Z. But in the living room, I think the more that we specify targets, the more that those are now eventually going to be decontextualized because those... Those are the five targets that I want to make sure that I hit. And I'm going to try to contrive those targets, even if it's not appropriate for the situation, rather than follow the child's lead. Because if those targets are down there, I'm not really following the child's lead. I'm somehow going to try to contrive the situation to get to my five targets. So I might be incorporating the child, but it's still not fully child-directed play.

SPEAKER_02: 46:46

And you're nailing a very important point. In the laboratory, in order to have experimental control, yes, it would behoove you to have pre-selected targets. That's just the way it works, so that you could replicate those targets across different participants if you're doing a small group study, right? Single subject wouldn't limit you to that, but I think you're nailing it. You're hitting it on the head in the sense that we have a tendency that once we create that adult-directed structure, that is the structure we're going to follow, and it leaves us with little room for spontaneity, let alone this idea of independence, the idea that you might independently choose a play action that isn't part of a predetermined Again, play, predetermined list for play, that's no longer play. Now you're following a routine, which is, again, there's a time and a place for that. But we're really trying to preserve the motivating operation of play here, which then behooves us to add actions, sounds that were emitted by the child for us to imitate and then expand and vary. toward their imitation. You're hitting a very important part here in terms of how this can be difficult for us clinicians who have been in the field a little longer, who have gotten accustomed or built a good rhythm in running adult-directed sessions or approaches, this creates a lot of room for child-directed input. And you have to be ready. You have to be on your toes, literally. And that's why contingent imitation and linguistic mapping become such an important part. They force you to pay attention. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 48:21

Pay attention. Absolutely. And you bring up the motivating operation of play. And I do just want to highlight that that literally just means make sure that play is fun. And Make sure that's motivating to the child, and that's our priority. So our priority over anything else is making sure that the play is fun. And then the joint attention, contingent imitation, reciprocal imitation, all of that can come as a result of that. But if we're prioritizing our targets over the fun play, we might get some data, but we're not going to get the generality, and we're going to lose that motivating operation.

SPEAKER_02: 48:52

When we talk about independence, what about the idea of spontaneity? that takes a great deal of independence as well. And I would say it's a pretty good human trait or good animal trait in general.

SPEAKER_00: 49:02

Hard to contextualize spontaneity in the typical SDR, SR, ABA contingency. Another one of those

SPEAKER_02: 49:11

quantifiable versus qualitative pieces that I think we're going to be talking about more and more here on ABA on Tap. And it doesn't make you devoid of data as much as now. The data takes a different role, right? Again, I said it earlier, but In ABA, we tend to plant the seed, we water it one day, and let's go ahead and measure, even though we know it hasn't grown an inch. And let's measure again the next day, and let's measure again the next day, only to keep verifying that there's no identifiable sprout. What we're kind of saying here is, why don't you take a look at the situation be reasonable about your approach given that we know that water and sunlight are going to help germinate and grow a seed and then once you see that sprout start measuring and you have to measure every given minute or day to ensure that you know that that sprout went from two inches to three inches? No. The simple measurement from two to three will verify that you grew that extra inch. You don't need every half inch in between or every quarter inch. And again, this is all lab to the living room premises that we did very good in preserving, which may over time have decontextualized, sort of taken our bedside manner away from us. So we're really, really good physicians. We just don't have really good side manner when we do things that way in my opinion um i'm going to continue on very quickly just because this we're we're quickly running out of time so i want to talk about we talked about the baseline sessions in the lab procedure and they broke this down into four different conditions which you've already alluded to with the idea of novelty so the first condition would be doing familiar actions with the same toy the child was using okay you could call that parallel play or contingent imitation is basically what that is. And familiar is defined as a behavior the child had demonstrated already spontaneously. Second condition were novel actions with the same toy. So first effort to get the child to imitate, having noticed the examiner by way of contingent imitation.

SPEAKER_00: 51:10

So familiar actions followed by novel actions with the same toy. Now,

SPEAKER_02: 51:15

familiar actions with a different toy. So you see how these repertoires are building with regard to actions and or objects. Sure. And then lastly, novel actions with a different toy. So the child would have to match the toy, imitate a novel action. This demonstrates the greatest amount of awareness or joint attention to complete the imitation trial as modeled by the examiner. And most importantly for this whole piece, at least for me, is that this matches a typical developmental progression. Recognize imitation, so the contingent imitation, initiate imitation of familiar actions, and then the imitation of novel actions. And this is just a learning trajectory, right? So when we say typical, the idea of normal, those words can be a little bit problematic. Are we being exclusive to something? All I'm saying here, or all these researchers are saying, all we're saying here is this is a progression which is going to allow anybody the access to learning from their environment through imitation. So whether you've been diagnosed, not diagnosed, this is just a human learning principle, not otherwise to be interpreted as exclusive or trying to change anybody.

SPEAKER_00: 52:24

And when you say access to learning through their environment, I might just add in access to learning through the least restrictive environment.

SPEAKER_02: 52:30

Yeah, hopefully. Yes, hopefully, especially with regard to our treatment, knowing that we're immediately baking in the child-directedness portion, the play-based portion. What do you expect kids to do? To play. And we come in here and sometimes derail that. Well, what this is saying is, no, come in, you join it, and then you draw out reciprocal limitation toward further programming and further skill building.

SPEAKER_00: 52:53

Exactly. Yeah. The more that we intervene, the more that environment becomes more restrictive. I remember when I was training at a previous company and we were talking about pivotal response training and one of the pivotal behaviors is a to multiple cues, being able to learn in an environment with a lot of stimuli. So what we would do oftentimes is de-stimuli, if that's a word, remove stimuli from the environment so the individual could attend to us better. Now that environment's becoming more and more restrictive and less and less generalizable. So we're making it more and more difficult for that individual to get put into a more naturalistic school setting or just interact with his parents or siblings at home? Because now every time they interact, it has to be in their specific setting.

SPEAKER_02: 53:38

That's an excellent, excellent point. And again, the logic is not lost on us. The reason we were doing that is to limit the amount of stimuli such that our particular targets and SDs could be the prevailing targets and SDs. Yes, inadvertently then and collaterally speaking, we were taking away from the enrichment of the environment. We were taking away from the power of generality. We were also taking away stimuli that some of our clients would throw in our faces or yes, we were being practical, but at the same time, there were some risks or some confounds that we were creating toward things like generality, for example.

SPEAKER_00: 54:12

Yeah. And that's where the authoritarian undertones come from is now we're saying certain stimuli in your environment are more important than other stimuli in your environment, which to be fair, it happens all the time, you know, throughout the Life, right? A bus about to hit me as I'm crossing the street is a more important stimulus for me to be aware of than the bird on the tree down the block. There are certain stimuli that are certainly more important than other stimuli, which is necessary in education. The way that it's currently working, a teacher will say that this math problem is a more important stimuli right now than... I don't know, you thinking about skateboarding or the skateboard in the corner for recess. But again, that's where some of those authoritarian undertones start to come. And we referenced the previous episode where we referenced the Stanford prison experiment, things like that. Obviously, we didn't get to that extreme. But there is a slippery slope you get to when you now have the power to tell people what stimuli they need to pay attention to and which ones they don't, which leads to the whole masking debate and some of the ABA detractors. I won't get into that. We've talked about that. Let's get back to the reciprocal imitation.

SPEAKER_02: 55:19

I mean, we might have to circle back and do an entire episode on what you just said, because, yes, the means to an end are very, very systematic, very methodological, very experimentally based, empirically valid systems. contributed to our authoritarianism why because i need you to do this because as the clinician this will make you quote unquote better so i need to force you into doing this when in fact we were missing many other ways in which we could do the exact same thing but just make it look a little bit differently by allowing the child to take the lead a little bit more yeah that i mean we you you nailed so many points there i am going to uh in the interest of time going to move forward to talk about so we talked about the baseline sessions in the experiment um We talked about the four different conditions. And then there are five different phases that were enacted as well. And this is where you can think about doing these things in your sessions. I would say they don't have to be in order. They might follow some sort of natural order just based on the way learning ensues. But the five different phases would be in phase one, no actions are modeled but only imitated based on the child's play behavior or any imitable action within reason. This allows you to determine familiar actions and objects. So that's more contingent imitation. That's exactly what it is. Or if you want to call it parallel play. Sure. Right. Developmentally speaking. Phase two, you identify familiar actions and items per phase one. Use the same toy and model familiar actions for child to imitate. So this idea is now all you're doing is you're doing the familiar action back and then you're waiting for them to do it. This is their action now. Yep. Right. You haven't changed anything. Phase three, you Using the same toy as the child, you model familiar and novel actions. Okay. Okay? On to phase four, same as phase three, but you add familiar actions with a different toy or stimulus. Okay. Okay, you see sort of how systematic this is? Lastly, phase five, familiar and novel actions using both the same and different toys than the child is using.

SPEAKER_00: 57:29

How is that different than phase

SPEAKER_02: 57:30

four? Um... So you've got everything familiar and novel at the same time. Gotcha. So phase four was just familiar actions with a new toy. So phase five just brings it all together. And again, if you think about the way these things are described, you're just playing. But you're playing in a way that has now been planned. It's systematic. And you're taking different variables in and out of the action. This is one of the places where we could branch off. Lab to the living room. This doesn't have to happen in order. But they did it in order in the lab in order to standardize a procedure and then be able to arrive at results which could be deemed as valid. Let's look at those very, very quickly. All subjects in this study made gains in spontaneous object imitation. The imitation maintained generalized to different settings, people, and objects. There were notable increases in language, pretend play, Join attention as a result of this intervention. There's all the soup ingredients we talk about. And for me, of course, great, great interest here, is naive observers found the children to look, quote unquote, more typical at post-treatment, suggesting that the treatment led to global behavior change. That's to say that these kids are out on the playground, these study subjects, you've got naive observers that have never seen any of the children there, and they rate the children based on their activity. Different, similar, are these kids seeming to play differently or be withdrawn? At the end of the study, they take a different set of naive observers, and then now allow them to see the same group of children children, at which point now in this study, those naive observers post-treatment did not see any observable difference in any of the kids, meaning that from a play perspective, our study subjects here were nicely integrated and just frolicking around the playground.

SPEAKER_00: 59:26

You said a term that I really like, global behavior change. I really like that term. It's the difference between working out and saying, well, I can bicep curl this much and I can bench press this much and I can leg curl this much, but how much does that actually help your life? How much are you using those skills? Are you functionally stronger? And that's what that global behavior change is saying, sure, maybe we could quantify it, but we can say functionally that this child is integrating with their peers and having more holistic benefits to their day-to-day life.

SPEAKER_02: 59:57

At that point in time, it doesn't matter whether or not, to your point, you rolled the car 10 times because by rolling it three times, I choose that global mix. So now maybe you're rolling the car down the slide. Maybe now the cars are getting dug into the sand. Whatever it is, you didn't have to do it a quantitatively in order to reap the qualitative benefits, socially speaking, if we're talking about play. So again, it's not to say that traditionally we had it wrong. We've just decontextualized it so far that we sort of lost the purpose, in my opinion, especially with one of these strange technologies like do this. Remember, it's got to be said like that. I'm not sure if we said it correctly earlier. We were just kind of saying do this. No, no, no, no. Do this. It gets higher at the end. Which means that now you might be inclined to say, Roll car. I'm going to advise against that. Just play. Try not to get into that voice. I am being a little facetious, but again, we've become so standardized, so systematic that even our inflection in many ways in delivering SDs has become singular.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:06

You know when that's really obvious? When we have clients that have peers that aren't on the spectrum and you see them talking to their child or their sibling with autism? Yeah. Do this. And you're like, oh, wow, that's wonder where they got that from. And good

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:22

job. Yep. Good job with that comment, Dan.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:25

Thank you. So in wrapping up reciprocal imitation, it seemed like both the four step and five step procedure started with a familiar object, familiar action, stayed with the familiar object, novel action, new object, familiar action, new object, either novel action or novel plus familiar action.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:46

Exactly, exactly. So it's contingent imitation. You're imitating them. They notice you. You start changing first the action, and then you change the object, and then you interchangeably do both. And again, if you just follow that progression from the idea of, I love the way you put it, egocentricity, I'm playing on my own, to now I'm playing next to somebody doing things that are similar, to now I am playing with somebody doing things that are similar and or different from what they're doing as we interact. drive the cars around the playground.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:19

And what I really like too, in, in the, um, in the honor of being truly child led is that if they're not doing what we want them to do, we're not prompting them and say, you need to, if I, if I'm on step, um, three with the new object or even step four with the new object and the new, uh, action and they're not doing it, I'm not going to prompt them because that's going back to adult directed. I'm going to go back a phase and do it with their, their object until they, uh, gain attention or I'm going to modify my behavior not prompting them not really touching them or anything like that i'm going to allow them to truly lead that interaction

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:54

and that's what that's what it's become is this dance as i like to say with staff this dance between i'm imitating you you're imitating me yep and then yes there's still a time and a place for the prompt assuming that you've developed or that that your client has demonstrated assent and is saying show me how to do something or i'm okay with you guiding me through this with a prompt you still have that in your back pocket and What we have found in practice, as you know, is prompts are largely fading away because we're doing everything from the antecedent base on the front end.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:26

I can vouch, yes. I've seen sessions like this. You've had me zoom in before, and it really is amazing to see the level of engagement that kids have and the level of power. And this is literally the opposite of masking. Kids are just in their element doing their thing.

SPEAKER_02: 1:03:42

And in all fairness, too, I should say, as we wrap up here, this is a slower progression than what I had experienced traditionally with ABA. And I told this to a parent recently who we got to see this sort of finalize in the sessions and I got to look at the parent as well as the staff member and say, you know all those times that you were imitating those quote-unquote weird sounds or doing those actions that were a little bit unorthodox? This is why. As the child was sitting there imitating the RBT through a song and had shoulders, knees, and toes or something, right? And it was just really neat to see, again, all of that happen organically without the need for prompting on the back end, which was something that traditionally was a very, very strong premise. The idea that this was part of the learning, that you had to recreate the exact action based on your target that was already preselected in order for any type of positive behavior to occur. This really opens that hole. notion up, right? It is much more organic. The child has a lot of say. The child has a lot of control. And what I was referencing back to this, what I was telling that parent is, if you had met me, say, 20 years ago, I hate to say it this way, but your child would have more single words than they do now. And she kind of looked at me wide-eyed, and I said, but now that you've met me in this day and age, I guarantee that in another six months or a year, your child will have more words, not just single words, and they'll have meaning. They won't just represent that they're going to get some sort of external reinforcer for having echoed something or done something that they've done repetitively and singularly out of context over months and years. And it was interesting to be able to say that. I've actually said that twice now in the past couple months and saying, yeah, in the old days, I guarantee they'd have more. They'd be saying red and they'd be saying more as well as signing it. They'd have all this bevy of single words. They would not have the awareness. And now, I assure you, they're going to have more than single words. They're going to speak. And they're going to do so contextually and with meaning and with social relevance. And I wholeheartedly feel that. And I think a lot of that has to do with us stepping back and looking at things like joint attention and now reciprocal imitation from a much more client or child-directed perspective.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:10

That's valuable, man. I couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. And it's just cool. I keep using the word humanistic element that therapy does now and how it's just like you're working with somebody. You're not telling somebody what to do. You're working with them as an active member of the treatment program, and it's really empowering. That's probably the best word, empowering.

SPEAKER_02: 1:06:29

I think that's a perfect way to end this, sir. Thank you for wrapping it up like that. Empowerment. Empowerment is the key here. Absolutely. Or at least one key here. Well,

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:37

empowerment and... Always analyze responsibly. Cheers. Cheers, man.

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:45

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.