Event Details
Degli Espinosa, F. (2025). Eye contact: To teach or not to teach? That is not the question. Perspectives on Behavior Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-025-00456-2
Should behavior analysts teach eye contact to autistic children? The question has been debated for decades, and it often leads to two unsatisfying answers: drill “look at me,” or drop eye contact as a goal altogether. In her 2025 Perspectives on Behavior Science article, Francesca Degli Espinosa offers a third way to look at it. She proposes that contact with another person’s eyes is better understood as a consequence of looking, rather than as a behavior in its own right. After reviewing the behavioral and developmental research on eye-looking, from its emergence at birth to its role in early social and verbal learning, she argues that the more useful question is whether social interaction should be established as a reinforcer for looking at others. In this Journal Club, Dr. Degli Espinosa will walk through the article’s main arguments and what they mean for assessment, goal selection, and teaching within everyday social activities, and will take questions from participants.
Presenter Expertise: Francesca began her career in behaviour analysis working as a tutor for a child with autism, in the UK in 1996. During that time she became interested in interventions that could both define and establish generalised learning: the ability to demonstrate novel responses within and across operant classes without each individual response having been previously reinforced. She was the Lead Clinician for the first UK-based EIBI outcome study (Remington et al., 2007) at the University of Southampton and within that context developed the Early Behavioural Intervention Curriculum (EBIC) an intervention framework derived from functional analyses of language to establish generative multiply controlled verbal behaviour, which subsequently formed the principal focus of her Ph.D. (2011). Her clinical and research interests focus on advanced applications of contemporary analyses of verbal behaviour (Horne & Lowe, 1996; Michael, Palmer, & Sundberg, 2011) as a basis for teaching generalised verbal repertoires, and, thereby, as a means of minimising the need to teach specific individual verbal responses. Currently, she runs a small diagnostic and assessment clinic in the UK and teaches behaviour analysis at the University of Salerno, Italy, her home country.
