Abstract
Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often engage in low levels of peer social interactions; therefore, we often need to explicitly teach these skills. In the current study, we implemented a combined tactile and textual prompt, delivered via a text message sent to an Apple Watch®, to prompt social initiations from children with ASD to peers during free play. Results showed that the text message prompts increased the frequency of independent social initiations for both participants. Furthermore, 1 participant continued to emit high levels of independent social initiations during a 1-month follow-up with no prompts.
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Acknowledgements
This project was completed in partial fulfillment of the master’s degree from California State University, Stanislaus, by the first author. This study was supported in part by a Student Engagement in Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity Mini-grant from California State University, Stanislaus. We thank Haide Rocha and Cecilia Schaffner for their assistance in collecting data.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional committee (Psychology Institutional Review Board, CSU Stanislaus, P-F17-72) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Research Highlights
• Clinicians can teach children to respond to text-message prompts during brief, individual sessions.
• Utilizing technology (e.g., cell phones and smart watches) may allow clinicians to deliver less intrusive prompts in play contexts.
• Text-message prompts permit clinicians to deliver specific, contextually appropriate prompts.
• Smart watches are common, socially acceptable stimuli that may be ideal mechanisms to deliver prompts naturalistically.
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Lopez, A.R., Wiskow, K.M. Teaching Children With Autism to Initiate Social Interactions Using Textual Prompts Delivered via Apple Watches®. Behav Analysis Practice 13, 641–647 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-019-00385-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-019-00385-y