Well, ABA is applied behavioural analysis, so to understand it, you need to understand behavioural analysis.
Behavioural analysis is a field of psychology that posits that we have no thoughts, emotions, etc, or if we do, we can't study them scientifically. All we can study is behaviour, and behaviour results from learnt stimulus-response associations.
So, for example, you ring a bell and then feed a dog, and after doing this several times, the dog starts salivating when he hears the bell. Do we know that the dog knows the bell means food? A behaviorist would say no. We just know that the bell elicits salivation because it has been paired with food. We don't know if the dog is aware of this, or even if the dog has awareness at all. Just that the dog reacts to a stimulus based on a learnt association with another stimulus.
There are two types of conditioning. Pavlovian or classical conditioning is what I just described. The other kind is operant conditioning. An example would be if whenever a child throws a tantrum in the supermarket, her father gives her a treat. Since tantrumming in the supermarket produces something the child finds enjoyable, the child will tantrum more often. This doesn't mean the child necessarily understands that she's embarrassing her father and that he wants her to be quiet. All she needs to understand to react that way is that tantrum in store = treat.
Behaviour analysis reduces all behaviour to those two processes. The theory posits that every behaviour, no matter how complex, was learnt by operant and/or classical conditioning.
Applied behaviour analysis, therefore, is an attempt to systematically control the learning context in order to allow the child to learn the desired behaviour through operant and/or classical conditioning. So, for example, they might notice that the autistic child smiles at shiny objects but not at faces. So, they repeatedly wave a shiny object in front of a person's face, so the child forms an association between faces and smiling. Or, maybe a child can't speak, but occasionally says 'mmm'. So, they tell the kid to 'say 'mama'' and if the child responds with 'mmm', the child gets a reward. Then, once the child is consistently responding 'mmm', they start rewarding only if the child happens to put a vowel in the sound as well. And then they reward only 'ma', and so forth, until the child is saying 'mama'.
Of course, just because you practice ABA doesn't mean you believe all behaviour comes from operant & classical conditioning. However, anything that uses anything other than operant & classical conditioning to teach is by definition not ABA.
Incidentally, behaviour analysis was really big in the 70s and 80s, but psychology has moved on since then. (Even if autism treatment has not.) Now, the big thing is cognitive psychology, which says that we can figure out what people think and know by carefully and systematically observing what they do. For example, a rat may use three possible routes to run a maze. Behaviour analysis theory would suggest that they've learnt three long stimulus-response chains. Cognitive psychology suggests that the rat might be using SR chains, or have a mental map of the maze and be thinking through the best route. If we block off the maze at a route where the shortest and second shortest routes intersect, behaviour analysis predicts the rat runs down the first route and gets blocked, then runs down the second route and gets blocked, and finally runs down the third route. However, if the rat has a mental map, after getting blocked at the first route, the rat will know the second route is blocked without needing to try it and will head straight for the third route. (In fact, rats do have mental maps.)
19 Aug 2015, 2:36 pm
