Functional analysis and treatment of eye poking with response blocking.

A young learners girl kept poking her eyes hard enough to scratch the cornea.

The team ran a short functional analysis. No clear pattern showed up.

They then tried response blocking. Each time her hand moved toward her eye, the therapist gently stopped it at the wrist.

Eye poking dropped to zero in the first ten-minute session.

The behavior stayed low for three weeks while blocking stayed in place.

Parents learned the move and used it at home with the same result.

Silbaugh et al. (2018) also used mild physical guidance. They stopped kids from turning away from food and saw quick gains in bite acceptance. Both studies show that calmly blocking the problem response can work when reinforcement alone fails.

Dolezal et al. (2010) found that giving attention reduced food refusal. That looks opposite to our case, but the eye poking here did not change when attention was given or taken away. The child’s behavior was not sensitive to social consequences, so blocking the movement itself was the safer fix.

Hedquist et al. (2020) compared two kinds of differential reinforcement for automatically reinforced behavior. When blocking is not allowed or not safe, their data say to pick DRA over DRO.

If your FA comes back flat and the behavior can injure the child, you do not have to wait for a perfect hypothesis. Response blocking gives you an immediate, low-risk way to stop the damage while you keep assessing. One simple wrist block kept this girl’s eyes safe and created space to teach safer ways to meet whatever need the poking served.