Abstract
Early behavioral interventions are recognized as integral to standard care in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and often focus on reinforcing desired behaviors (e.g., eye contact) and reducing the presence of atypical behaviors (e.g., echoing others' phrases). However, efficacy of these programs is mixed. Reinforcement learning relies on neurocircuitry that has been reported to be atypical in ASD: prefrontal-sub-cortical circuits, amygdala, brainstem, and cerebellum. Thus, early behavioral interventions rely on neurocircuitry that may function atypically in at least a subset of individuals with ASD. Recent work has investigated physiological, behavioral, and neural responses to reinforcers to uncover differences in motivation and learning in ASD. We will synthesize this work to identify promising avenues for future research that ultimately can be used to enhance the efficacy of early intervention.
Highlights
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impairments in communication and social interactions, as well as repetitive and stereotyped behaviors, and restricted interests (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)
Participants with ASD have shown similar initial learning, but they need a larger number of trials to acquire new contingencies after a reversal and make more regressive errors (D’Cruz et al, 2013)
Variation between studies may be due to differences in paradigms, but may be caused by inter-individual variability, which few studies have explicitly explored. Such a marker could be useful in the context of assessing reinforcer preference (Kang et al, 2013), determining the optimal magnitude of a reinforcer (TrosclairLasserre et al, 2008), and predicting the likelihood of response to intervention (Klintwall and Eikeseth, 2012)
Summary
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impairments in communication and social interactions, as well as repetitive and stereotyped behaviors, and restricted interests (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Variable response to reinforcement-based therapy is not unique to ASD, this evidence suggests that relying on neurocircuitry associated with operant learning could pose challenges to successful behavior modification in this population The aim of this nonsystematic literature review (Grant and Booth, 2009) is to conduct a survey of the current evidence for atypical RL in ASD in order to address the question of whether abnormal RL, or inter-individual variability, could impact treatment efficacy. A third study in adults with ASD who showed no cognitive impairment (often referred to as “high functioning ASD”) found no difference in eyeblink or facial EMG measurements to pleasant and unpleasant IAPS pictures (Mathersul et al, 2013a) These authors note that in contrast to previous studies, the images they used were more consistent, containing only social affective scenes, rather than image sets comprised of social and non-social images, which may have led to a more consistent overall response. Another study looking at involuntary mimicry recorded EMG from five groups of facial muscles while children categorized emotions of 192 facial
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