Earlier autism diagnosis, the importance of early intervention, and development of specific interventions for young children have contributed to the emergence of similar, empirically supported, autism interventions that represent the merging of applied behavioral and developmental sciences. “Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions (NDBI)” are implemented in natural settings, involve shared control between child and therapist, utilize natural contingencies, and use a variety of behavioral strategies to teach developmentally appropriate and prerequisite skills. We describe the development of NDBIs, their theoretical bases, empirical support, requisite characteristics, common features, and suggest future research needs. We wish to bring parsimony to a field that includes interventions with different names but common features thus improving understanding and choice-making among families, service providers and referring agencies.

Preverbal communication and joint attention have long been of interest to researchers and practitioners. Both attending to social partners and sharing attentional focus between objects or events and others precede the onset of a child's first lexicon. In addition, these prelinguistic acts also appear to have important implications with regard to learning to socialize. The construct of joint attention has been noted as an early developing area prior to the transition to symbolic communication. Thus, the importance of joint attention in typically developing children, and the lack thereof in children with autism, has interested researchers for use in diagnosis and intervention for autism. That is, joint attention has been gaining momentum as an area that not only helps characterize children with autism, but also as a prognostic indicator and a potential intervention goal. In this paper, the status of the literature about initiation of joint attention by young typically developing children and young children with autism was examined. Empirical studies regarding joint attention behaviors, including eye gaze alternation, the use of protodeclaratives and protoimperatives, and studies that investigated joint attention as a predictor of language acquisition were reviewed. Possible areas for future research for children with autism are discussed.

Light-, dark-, and dot-reared rats were trained on a three-way oddity discrimination of horizontal and vertical rows of dots and were then tested on five sets of transfer stimuli including the original dot stimuli and stimuli with solid stripes in the same orientations. Anomalous transfer effects and effects on discrimination ability due to biased rearing were not found to be as general as previously thought. The absence of behavioral consequence of bias-rearing is discussed in relation to recent neurophysiological and behavioral evidence.

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In 3 experiments the performances of light-reared (LR) and dark-reared (DR) 90-day-old rats were compared on a variety of transfer tests following acquisition of 3 discriminations involving patterns of small squares (dots). Though no significant difference due to rearing condition was found in acquisition of those discriminations consisting of single lines of dots in various orientations, transfer tests did reveal subtle differences in the way LR and DR rats analyze contour information. Significant differences due to rearing were also observed on the acquisition of a complex dot pattern (gradient vs X) and, in spite of overtraining, on subsequent stimulus equivalence tests. Anomalous transfer effects were not observed in any of these test situations.