Ole Ivar Lovaas

Perhaps most well known, Ole Ivar Lovaas, was a psychology professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. Dr. Lovaas began working with older children with autism in the same decade that Skinner wrote his now famous, Science and Human Behavior text in 1953.
Lovaas began to apply the experimental behaviour analysis developed by Skinner to people with autism. Unfortunately, Lovaas achieved limited success at first. However, he refocused his efforts on children under the age of 5, placed the implementation of treatment in the child’s own home and increased the intensity (a measurement of the amount of “therapy time”) to about 40 hours weekly. In one of Lovaas’ studies, 47% of the children in the study (9 children) made remarkable progress to the point of becoming “recovered”, while a further 42% (8 children) made significant improvements. Even still, however, 11% made little to no gains. Lovaas wrote a user friendly manual, Teaching Developmentally Disabled Children: The Me Book in 1981. In 2002, Lovaas wrote, Teaching Individuals With Developmental Delays: Basic Intervention Techniques.  Lovaas has published more than 70 publications throughout his career.