A Study On The Intervention Of Stimulus-stimulus Pairing To The Gaze Behavior Of Children With Autism

Lack of gaze behavior is a common phenomenon among the children of autism,they often tend to avoid eye contact,be indifferent and unsocial,so they have difficulty in forming a stable interpersonal relationships,which causes difficulties in smoothly integrating into the study and life.Some studies have shown that gaze behavior is the basis and preparation skills for children to develop joint attention,language,imitation and other abilities.Therefor,the shortage of gaze behavior will affect the development of higher skills of the children of autism.The studies of gaze behavior on the children of autism are conducive to the development of these abilities,but also can help them to develop social abilities.However,most of the existing studies of gaze behavior of autistic children are difficult to produce the maintenance and generalization effect;the intervention effect is limited and difficult to applied in real life.The purpose of this study is to explore the effect and social validity of stimulus-stimulus pairing on gaze behavior intervention in the children of autism.Moreover,The purpose of this study also to preliminarily explore the effect of this teaching method on the joint attention ability of the children of autism.In this study,two children with autism aged 5-6 years old were selected as study subjects,the study design is a combined design of multiple-probe across two behaviors and two participants,which belongs to single case research design.The independent variable is the stimulus-stimulus pairing,including four stages:(1)the full reinforcer pairing stage;(2)1/2 reinforcer+1/2 gesture pairing stage;(3)the full gesture pairing stage;(4)no pairing stage.The dependent variable is gaze behavior,which including eye-contact and gaze following.To compare the generalization effect of eye gaze in autistic children in this study,four typical children of the even-aged as the study subjects were selected for comparison.The data are analyzed and discussed through visual analysis,procedural fidelity check,inter-observer agreement and social validityanalysis.The results show that:(1)stimulus-stimulus pairing have a good immediate effect on gaze behavior of the children of autism;(2)stimulus-stimulus pairing have a good effect on maintaining gaze behavior of the children of autism;(3)stimulus-stimulus pairing have a good generalization effect on gaze behavior of the children of autism;(4)stimulus-stimulus pairing have a good social validity for gaze behavior intervention of the children of autism.On the basis of expounding the above study results,this study also explains the phenomena in the intervention process from the aspects of prerequisite skills and learning characteristics.Finally,the study summarizes the limitations in the process and puts forward suggestions for the future studies and teaching.