Manipulating establishing operations to promote initiations toward peers in children with autism.
Skip the toys—just delay a favorite snack for 20 minutes and watch the child ask a peer for it.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Three kids with autism, joined snack-time sessions.
Researchers first let them eat their favorite chips freely. Then they took the chips away for 30 minutes.
They used an ABAB design: free chips, no chips, free chips, no chips.
Each time, they counted how often the child asked a peer for the snack.
What they found
When chips were free, no child asked a peer for them.
When chips were withheld, every child started asking peers within minutes.
The effect flipped on and off like a light switch across all phases.
How this fits with other research
Jones et al. (2010) did the same trick with adult attention instead of snacks. They gave 45 minutes of non-stop attention before sessions. Problem behavior rose. Take the attention away and it dropped. Same EO idea, different reinforcer.
Farmer-Dougan (1994) and Landry et al. (1989) showed peers can teach language without EO tricks. They used peer modeling and incidental teaching. Kids learned to ask for things, but it took weeks of training. The EO method in Nevin et al. (2005) worked in one session.
Stewart et al. (2018) reviewed 48 studies on aided AAC. All needed devices or pictures. The snack EO study used no tools—just hunger and a peer.
Why it matters
You can set up brief, safe deprivation to spark peer interaction right away. Skip the long peer-training programs. Just hold the goldfish crackers for 20-30 minutes, then have the peer hold the bag. The child learns to mand to a real person, not a device.
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Join Free →Before snack time, keep the child's preferred crackers out of reach for 20 minutes, then hand the bag to a peer and wait for the mand.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study examined the effects of manipulating establishing operations on the frequency of initiations of three children with autism toward peers with autism. The EO targeted was deprivation of preferred edibles, and the target initiation was a mand for the preferred snack. A reversal design was used to assess the effects of the EO conditions on frequency of initiations. Results indicated that when the EO was absent, no spontaneous initiations toward the peer occurred. Two participants required training sessions with an adult to transfer initiations toward peers. Once the EO had been established and was present, the participants initiated mands for the snack. Results are discussed in terms of implications for the use of establishing operations in language training for children with autism.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2005 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2004.11.003