DR. JOANNE GERENSER: So now what we're going to do is we're going to talk about the learning characteristics. And this is sort of my favorite topic, because, again, this is information that we think we know about how individuals on the spectrum process the world. And for me, when I work with kids with autism, and I get stuck-- and I don't know anybody that I know that's worked with a kid with autism that doesn't periodically get stuck-- like, why is he not getting this? I don't know why he doesn't seem to understand this. Or why is he engaging in this behavior that's so problematic? I go back to this information, because this information-- and I try and put myself into their shoes thinking about this information. So I urge you to really pay attention to this and think about this. If you're working with kids with autism now, think about the kids that you're working with and how this might play a role in what they're doing.

So the first thing we believe about kids with autism is this concept of stimulus over-selectivity. So what this means is that kids with autism, in theory, don't know what to pay attention to. Oftentimes they're over-selecting on completely irrelevant information, things that actually aren't important to what you're talking about. And the problem with that is that you may be teaching them one thing, but they're paying attention to something completely different.

So they may be paying attention to the background color of pictures and not to the actual pictures themselves. What this does is it impacts generalization. If you're not paying attention to the right thing, then you're going to have a difficult time generalizing.

I'm going to give you a real-life example of somebody that's not on the spectrum, although maybe she is, we don't really know. But my mother, about a year ago, we were driving through a really small town. And she was driving, which is probably my mistake, but she kept running red lights. And I'm like, what are you doing? You keep running these red lights. So she's like, what red lights? And I finally made her pull over. The red lights were actually not vertical, but they were horizontal. And so she wasn't paying attention to the relevant information, which was the fact that there was a red light. She was looking for, in her mind, if the light wasn't vertical, it wasn't relevant.

And so she wasn't generalizing the knowledge of her understanding of what to do to red lights to this town. They have a difficult time seeing the big picture, because if you're not paying attention to relevant information, you often miss what's happening. And again, think about how this impacts on your ability to learn or your ability to function.

They often engage-- as you know, because it's part of the DSM-IV and the DSM-5-- they'll engage in repetitive behavior, stereotypic behavior. And a lot of research into this repetitive behavior talks about how it interferes with learning, or it interferes with your ability to pay attention to the world. And think about this. Just think about yourself. If you're right now, because obviously I can't see what you're doing, so if you're watching this video while at the same time you're playing Words with Friends or doing work on the computer that may be irrelevant to what you're doing, you're going to have a hard time on the quizzes. You're going to end up not doing well, because you're not learning the information I'm talking about. You're, in essence, engaging in self-stimulatory behavior.

And the difference between you and a child with autism is, hopefully, you make better choices. Hopefully, you're not doing those things and that you're actually paying attention to what I'm talking about, because for you, it will be important that you learn this information, and you know that. Whereas a child with autism will engage in self-stimulatory behaviors whenever they feel like it, not realizing how important it is not to engage in those behaviors.

So we know that there's an inverse relationship between self-stimulatory behaviors and learning. If you think about it, if you have high rates of self-stimulatory behavior, then that means it's going to impair your learning. And if it impairs your learning, you're going to acquire fewer skills. The fewer skills you have, it's going to mean you have less ability to learn. The less ability to learn you have, the more you're going to stem. So it's this vicious cycle.

See, if you were sitting right now and I was speaking to you in Russian, and you didn't speak Russian, about three minutes in, you would be engaged in high rates of self-stimulatory behavior, because you don't know what's going on. And no matter how hard you try to pay attention, you're still not going to know what's going on. And we all only have so much tolerance to sit and do nothing.

Last night I went to dinner. I was here, so I went to dinner by myself. And when I go to dinner by myself, I bring an iPad, a Kindle, a phone. I'm engaged in behaviors, because you can't just sit there and stare into space. Otherwise, you're going to start to engage in seriously repetitive behavior. And I was watching somebody just eating, sitting there, and I was thinking, wow, she must have an active internal imagination to just sit there for an hour and do nothing.

Another important bit of information that we have about individuals on the spectrum is that they process the information differently. They process stimuli differently. One of the most important things that we know is that many individuals with autism have a difficult time with transient input. And if you think about that for a second, what do you think the most transient piece of information is that you get? It's speech. It's here. It's gone. It's here. It's gone.

So if you're not paying attention, and if you're having a hard time with transient input, you're going to miss a lot of information. That's why many, many of the children we work with are highly visual. And they do better with visual stimuli because it's less transient. When we work with classroom teachers, we're often saying, write the information down for them. If you're going to tell them their homework assignments, also write it on the blackboard. Give them sheets of information that will help them listen to the lecture. It's often very, very difficult for them to attend and process the transient input information.

They also have a hard time, however, with multiple queues because, again, they don't know what to pay attention to. So if they're getting information in very multiple sources, they're going to have a difficult time processing that. And then there's this difficulty with theory of mind, which I will talk in much, much more detail about in a later lecture.

Processing transient information-- I've kind of gone through these. Issues with motivation is another important information. When a baby is born, and I'm going to talk about this in the next lecture, they develop this ability to understand social positive information very early in life. So by two, three months of age, babies recognize smiles and feel good about it. Babies, within a year or two, understand words like wow, that's great, or I love what you're doing.

We don't believe that kids with autism are responding to social information or social reinforcers from very early on, and then have a difficult time with them, oftentimes, for a very long time, which means they're not responding to natural social contingencies or social reinforcers. What that means is that we have a lot work to do if we're going to understand how they're benefiting from reinforcement.

We have to oftentimes do motivation assessments. If we want our kids to learn, we have to know what they're going to be motivated by. And if you think, oh, I can use whatever I used with my last student, you're probably going to miss the boat. The one thing we know for sure is you're not going to learn without a reinforcer. That's the key to effective learning. So pay attention to what motivates your children. And there's a lot of information available on how to assess motivation and preference assessments in children with autism.

Another important thing that we know is that kids with autism aren't just picking things up from the natural environment. They're not just paying attention to their peers. It's one of the issues we have with just putting kids into inclusion settings. If you take a child and you just put him with his typical peers, is he going to benefit from it? And the answer to that is for many children, no. We have to teach them how to learn from their peers, which is why many children start in a one-to-one setting maybe in their home or in a segregated environment. And then we quickly transition them once they learn how to learn from their natural environment.

And lastly, I think an important bit of information is that children with autism are not really delayed in their development. I mean they are in many cases. But we would describe it more as disordered. And the reason we say that is that their profile is all over the place. So you might have an individual who talks in five-word utterances with an IQ of 120 who has a difficult time with toilet training or with skills that should fall below that. And that's important for us to know, because standardized assessment tools are going to be very meaningless because we often have to stop after we get three incorrect. But then oftentimes if we kept going, you're going to see that they actually know things up here and things over here. So it's important for you to pay attention to the learner's profile, because you want to know what their strengths are, what their limitations are.

But if you start at the highest level and assume everything is at the highest level, you may be wrong. And they may be missing a lot of information. And if you start at the lowest level, you may be starting far too low, where they actually have a lot of the skills that are above what they know.

And so oftentimes what this means is that kids are memorizing things. But they don't often comprehend what they memorize. So you think, oh, they know all this stuff. But four weeks later, five weeks later, they're unable to actually apply the information. You're going to see serious generalization problems from one environment to another environment. And so understanding these learning characteristics will help you problem-solve as you're working with kids on the spectrum.

If I have a child, for example, who learned to identify apple-- the picture apple-- and then he learned to identify the picture shoe, but then later I show him an apple and he can't discriminate it, it's probably because he was not paying attention to the actual apple on the picture. There was something irrelevant that he used as a queue to be able to have him label this picture.

So I have to be very, very smart about the stimuli I use and really carefully assessing what his learning characteristics are going to do to the way he or she is actually learning. Again, here's your quiz. And take some time to take it. And hopefully, you weren't stemming during this lecture, so you paid attention.