This article describes key areas of behavior (pivotal behaviors) that underlie other behaviors in children with autism. These pivotal behaviors include: motivation, responding to complicated sensory cues, self-management, and initiating social interactions.
Applied behavior analysis (ABA) can be used to teach many kinds of behaviors, and some researchers have suggested that teaching âpivotalâ behaviors that affect many other, related behaviors is the best approach to treating children with autism. The authors begin by describing pivotal response training, the name given to this idea. They then list several important pivotal behaviors, and give examples of how they affect other behaviors. For example, they describe how increasing motivation by careful use of reinforcement can result in big improvements in speech for nonverbal children with autism. In another example, children with autism were trained with ABA to ask the question, "What's that?" This simple training then resulted in improvements in vocabulary and speech in general.
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