UC Merced Undergraduate Research Journal

Progressive alignment techniques can be utilized with clinically-diagnosed autistic childrento improve their social cognition, or, more specifically, their ability to recognize differentfacial expressions according to the associated feeling/emotion. Progressive alignmenttechniques (that involve comparison and categorization processes) have been shown tolead to changes in children’s representations of relational structure, allowing for them tomore easily identify more abstract features. In general, intensive, long-term, appliedbehavior treatment has already been shown to improve the cognitive, language, adaptive,and academic skills of children with autism. Further, other research has proven that theamygdala is also involved in the process of behavior reinforcement through rewards (orpositive reinforcement). This literature review, more specifically, aims to both A) supportthe idea that there is a positive correlation between progressive alignment methods andmildly autistic children with social deficits and B) demonstrate specific, potentialexperimental methods to support such a relationship