77 Indeed, in nonclinical populations, the ability to develop skilled performance of complex domains of behavior tends to develop more directly through experience rather than acquisition of knowledge.78 Such findings, however, reflect clear mechanistic processes of skill development in other populations.

Thus, they present a fruitful avenue for direct consideration of the mechanism of social knowledge training in the development of social functioning in ASD populations. Indeed, because knowledge-training components of interventions are fairly modular, they lend themselves quite naturally to a “dismantling” approach to exploring potential mechanisms.79 Dismantling studies “take apart” components of existing intervention packages, such as Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical exposure and behavioral experiments for anxiety disorders,80 and randomly assign participants to receive them Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical independently to assess their relative contribution to the overall efficacy of the package. In a recent study, Lerner and Mikami81 used a dismantling approach to explore trajectories of change in peer interaction between knowledge -training and experience-based SST conditions. This preliminary study found faster rates of friendship-making and peer interaction in the experience condition, but comparable change overall between conditions. These differences implicate unique, discrete mechanisms in each condition, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical which bear further investigation in subsequent research.

Social motivation The ability of social information

and prosocial interaction to uniquely Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical capture and sustain interest and attention, or social motivation, is thought to be a fundamental building block of typical human development and a crucial element of human eusociality.82 Indeed, in typically developing (TD) individuals, the neural processes that facilitate social motivation may permit attending to and learning in social scenarios.83 Social amotivation may be pathognomonic in ASD populations, and may underlie Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical deficits in social functioning.84,85 Indeed, neuroanatomical evidence suggests that impaired social motivation in ASD populations may affect social learning.86 This suggests that social motivation may be a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for engagement in successful social behavior. Basic behavioral interventions for ASD, such as pivotal response training, have long posited that increasing social motivation may be a crucial element of increasing social behavior in this population.31,85,87 However, only recently have psychosocial interventions, Cilengitide such as SSTs, begun to consider the inclusion of components to address social motivation (such as pairing social interaction with intrinsically motivating activities) as treatment table 5 ingredients.88,89 While these SST studies have presented promising findings in terms of long-term outcomes, no research has yet explored the degree to which increasing motivation may be responsible for such results. This is, in part, due to the difficulty in accurately measuring this subtle construct.