Reflections on 50 years of ASD Early Intervention Science

In May of 1965,  Life Magazine published a cover story on Ivar Lovaas's UCLA autism intervention study, bringing autism and the challenges it creates for children and families into the public eye for the first time. Fifty years later, early autism intervention is the topic of lawsuits, protests, and hope. The powerful effects of high quality intensive early intervention delivered in the first few years of life provide new insights into the multiple mechanisms underlying developmental and behavioral impairments associated with early ASD.  This keynote will (1) describe and illustrate the kinds of gains that high quality intervention can facilitate, (2) identify treatment elements common to the most successful approaches, highlighting research from the Early Start Denver Model (Dawson and Rogers 2010), and (3) consider varying ways of conceptualizing treatment response.