Sensory Extinction

Description of the Strategy

Since the late 1970s, a procedure referred to as sensory extinction has provided clinicians with a tool for addressing certain problematic behaviors of individuals with disabilities. The term sensory extinction, coined by Arnold Rincover, refers to masking or removing the sensory effects of an undesirable behavior in order to reduce or eliminate the behavior. Sensory extinction procedures have been used to address proprioceptive, visual, auditory, and tactile forms of stimulation produced by undesirable behavior (e.g., clicking and grinding sound produced by clenching teeth). The procedure operates on the basic principle of extinction, which means that when a behavior no longer produces the outcome that was maintaining it or keeping it going (e.g., reinforcement), the behavior will stop.

Individuals with developmental disabilities and autism frequently exhibit high levels of self-stimulatory behavior, many of which can be self-destructive (e.g., self-injurious behavior). The functional analysis procedures developed in the 1980s provide a tool for clinicians and researchers to determine what environmental factors might influence these unusual human behaviors. The most commonly identified factors that maintain behavior are social interactions with others, escape or termination of unpleasant events, access to highly preferred items and activities, and specific sensory experiences produced directly by the behavior referred to as automatic reinforcement.

The term automatic reinforcement is used to describe behavior that is not affected by social experiences with others. Instead, these behaviors occur because something about the behavior itself produces a desirable physical or sensory experience. For example, people may drum their fingers in time to music because they enjoy the sound it makes or the feeling it produces. One might also twirl a lock of hair because of the tactile experience (i.e., feeling of hair on the skin) or the proprioceptive experience (i.e., feeling of movement) twirling produces. A person with an itch will scratch in order to produce the specific physical sensation of cessation of the itch. Each of these behaviors is considered self-stimulatory because the behavior occurs in order to produce a sensation rather than to effect a social experience with another person.

When behavior is maintained by its own sensory consequences, the physical experience the behavior produces is always available. Children with autism who wave their fingers in front of their face because they like the visual stimulation that is produced always have the option to engage in that behavior. The ubiquitous nature of the reinforcer often leads to situations where a child will engage in the self-stimulatory behavior instead of interacting with others or participating in learning experiences. Thus, behaviors maintained by automatic reinforcement can dramatically limit a child's skills and experiences, making these some of the most important behaviors to treat.

Sensory extinction procedures require the clinician to generate hypotheses about the sensory impact of a behavior and to find creative ways to interrupt the connection between the behavior and the sensory experience it produces. There are three typical means for creating this interruption. First, sensory extinction may take the form of environmental alteration in such a way that the behavior no longer produces the sensory experience. In Rincover's first demonstration of the procedure, a child incessantly spun a plate on a table in order to produce an unusual sound. Sensory extinction was implemented by carpeting the top of the table to muffle the sound. The child could still spin the plate, but engaging in the behavior no longer produced the desired effect (i.e., extinction). He subsequently stopped spinning the plate.

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