Stereotypic Behaviors and Feeding Difficulties in Adults With Developmental Disabilities

Intervention Treatment will involve backward chaining, fading and differential reinforcement.

This will be identical to baseline, except a DRH will be introduced: The participant will be instructed to complete his whole meal within set time criteria to receive an identified reinforcer.

RIRD involves physically blocking a movement from occurring using the least amount of physical contact for max 3 s, and then redirecting behavior to an ongoing activity or movement. Stereotypi that is verbal or not possible to block physically will involve a demand to answer a verbal question or a motor task that sufficiently interrupts the behavior and then redirecting.

"The following procedures are based on Slaton et al. (2016): At the start of each session, the candidate or therapist will hold up the red card, prompt the participant to touch the card, while saying we are in red now, time to work. The participant will have to perform age- or function appropriate tasks without stereotypi to gain access to the green phase. Demand will be designated with a token economy, where each token represents completion of a certain amount of task-related responses. The participant will not be prompted to perform the tasks. If the participant makes an error in a task (e.g. answer a math question incorrectly), this will lead to an error correction and no token will be presented. If stereotypi occurs, it will be blocked for up to 3 s, and then all demands will be reset by removing all earned tokens."