Conducting research with minimally verbal participants with autism spectrum disorder
Use ABA shaping to make high-tech brain and eye labs work for kids who barely speak.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team wrote a how-to guide for running eye-tracking and EEG studies with kids who have little or no speech.
They pulled tips from ABA labs that already work with this group.
The paper lists step-by-step ways to keep data clean and keep the kids calm.
What they found
The guide says to start with short visits, favorite snacks, and tiny steps.
Kids sit on a parent’s lap, wear the cap for two seconds, then five, then ten.
By the end, most kids give usable brain and eye data that used to be tossed out.
How this fits with other research
Tsiouri et al. (2012) showed that the same kids can learn first words with DTT.
Tager-Flusberg et al. (2016) now shows you can also pull clean EEG from them—so you can test if the new words change their brain waves.
Lim et al. (2016) found smaller early brain waves in older ASD teens during simple visual tasks.
Their data warns us: if you skip the warm-up steps, you may record noise and call it a brain difference.
Why it matters
You can now add brain and eye measures to your skill-tracking without losing the least verbal clients.
Use the same shaping steps you already know from DTT: tiny trials, strong reinforcers, parent as coach.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A growing number of research groups are now including older minimally verbal individuals with autism spectrum disorder in their studies to encompass the full range of heterogeneity in the population. There are numerous barriers that prevent researchers from collecting high-quality data from these individuals, in part because of the challenging behaviors with which they present alongside their very limited means for communication. In this article, we summarize the practices that we have developed, based on applied behavioral analysis techniques, and have used in our ongoing research on behavioral, eye-tracking, and electrophysiological studies of minimally verbal children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. Our goal is to provide the field with useful guidelines that will promote the inclusion of the entire spectrum of individuals with autism spectrum disorder in future research investigations.
Autism, 2016 · doi:10.1177/1362361316654605