A question from a list was thrown out and this was the answer I gave:

> EYE CONTACT
>
> IS this something you would target as a specific skill?
> Do you work on this and require it for most of your responding?
> Why or why not?


hmm....

When I first decided to do ABA, I had the Maurice Manualt,
myself, some M&M's because I was clueless about reinforcement,
and a notion that I needed to start with "look at me".

Now mind you, Lukas looked at you- most especially when you
weren't placing demands on him or when he was manding or wanting
something from you. He didn't have the perfect eye contact that
the Mythical NT child has but it was present.

So what did I do? I sat in a chair with him and said, "look at
me" and when he did, I fed him an M&M. hehe.. Yeah, I also
tried doing 10 trials so that I could collect data like 2/10
or something.

What was the result? (I already know everyone is laughing at my
very bad attempts at ABA):

Lukas looked at me less & one day, Lukas was swinging and he
said "look at me" when I looked at him, he asked me in Italian,
"where is the M&M?"

hmmm...


We also tended to try the whole:
I can't hear you, you aren't looking at me
No. Look at me
Look.

We tried the above when doing DTT on other skills. What was the
result? THe result was a lower success rate in him answering the SD
correctly and less eye contact.

Our data sheet did track eye contact and for the most part, it was
pretty darn good. :)

We were told not to require eye contact on unmastered skills and
require it on mastered skills.

I developed a fear of making Lukas look like a child who went through ABA.

I met a child once who would stick his face out towards you and stare as deeply as he could without blinking. I know the parents did a “look at me drill” and I don’t think in their case it was very successful because it wasn’t a normal way of looking at people. It seemed like it was forced and he was actively concentrating on staring at you.

What increased the eye contact to near "mythical nt" standards?

Reinforcement.

I started a program called "reinforce". We picked one behavior at a
time and all the tutors were required to record how often they
reinforced the presence of the behavior or the absence of the
behavior.


It was brilliant.

The tutors felt competitive with each other to see who remembered to
reinforce it more. They did all sorts of things besides the "nice
looking" which can seem.. well... artificial or odd in public.

"wow. you have the most beautiful eyes."
"I love your eyes."
"I could stare into your eyes forever"
"when you look at me like that, I just wanna love you all over!"
"killer eyes"
"the way you look at me just blows me away"
"the way you look at me takes my breath away"
and so on and so on.

He started coming up to us and looking at us deeply with this HUGE grin because he couldn’t wait for you to notice him.

It made us realise how we tended to not reinforce the presence of the
behavior and we tended to nag when it wasn't present.

Reinforcing the presence of the behavior made all the difference-
for us.