The establishment of imitation and its use for the development of complex behavior in schizophrenic children

This paper presents a procedure for, and data pertaining to, the establishment of non-verbal imitative behavior in schizophrenic children, and the extension of such behavior for therapeutic usefulness into the child's day-to-day functioning. The program consisted of two parts, the initial part involving the training of imitative behavior on sixty tasks, ranging from the easy to the complex. Training in imitation was analogous to a discrimination training procedure, wherein the children were reinforced (usually with bites of food) for increasingly close approximations to the adult's behavior. The acquisition curves for each of the eleven children who underwent this training were positively accelerated, but their rates of acquisition varied enormously. Upon completion of the initial training of the sixty tasks, the training was extended into socially and intellectually useful behavior, such as personal hygiene, preschool games, drawing and printing, elementary interpersonal skills, etc.