Positive Reinforcement and Behavioral Deficits of Autistic Children

Infantile autism, first described by Kanner (6), is a very severe psychotic disturbance occurring in children as young as 2 years. At least outwardly, the childhood schizophrenia is a model of adult schizophrenia. Speech and control by the social environment are limited or absent; tantrums and atavistic behaviors are frequent and of high intensity; and most activities are of a simple sort, such as smearing, lying about, rubbing a surface, playing with a finger, and so forth. Infantile autism is a relatively rare form of schizophrenia and is not important from an epidemiological point of view. The analysis of the autistic child may be of theoretical use, however, since his psychosis may be a prototype of the adult’s; but the causal factors could not be so complicated, because of the briefer environmental history. In this paper, I should like to analyze how the basic variables determining the child’s behavior might operate to produce the particular kinds of behavioral deficits seen in the autistic child. To analyze the autistic child’s behavioral deficits, I shall proceed from the general principles of behavior, derived from a variety of species, which describe the kinds of factors that alter the frequency of any arbitrary act (3, 10). The general principles of behavior applied to the specific situations presumably present during the child’s developmental period will lead to hypotheses as to specific factors in the autistic child’s home life which could produce the severe changes in frequency as well as in the form of his behavior. As an example, consider the effect of intermittent reinforcement, many of the properties of which are comparatively well known from animal experiments. To find how intermittent reinforcement of the autistic child’s behavior might produce deficits, we would first determine, in the general case, what specific order of magnitude and kinds of schedules produce weakened behavioral repertoires. The factors in the child’s home life could be examined to determine estimates of what kind of circumstances could conceivably cause schedules of reinforcement capable of the required attenuation of the child’s behavior. The analysis will emphasize the child’s performance as it is changed by, and affected in, social and nonsocial environment. As in most problems of human behavior, the major datum is the frequency of occurrence of the child’s behavior. Although the account of the autistic child’s development and performance is not derived by manipulative experiments, it may still be useful to the extent that all of the terms of the analysis refer to potentially manipulable conditions in the child’s environment and directly measurable aspects of his performance. Such an analysis is even more useful if the performances and their effects on the environment were described in the same general terms used in systematic accounts of behavior of experimental psychology.