Advanced Certificate in Autism, Executive Function, and Neuropsychology-Informed ABA Practice
Using Frontal Systems, Neuropsychological Assessment Findings, and Developmental Profiles to Improve ABA Treatment Planning
This advanced training program integrates neuropsychology and applied behavior analysis to enhance clinical decision-making and improve treatment outcomes in individuals with autism and related neurodevelopmental profiles. The course provides in-depth instruction on frontal lobe functioning and executive systems, including inhibition, cognitive flexibility, generativity, planning, impulse control, and self-monitoring.
Participants will develop a clear understanding of how these executive processes influence behavior regulation, learning, and responsiveness to reinforcement. Emphasis is placed on translating neuropsychological findings into practical ABA strategies, allowing clinicians to identify why interventions may be ineffective and how to adjust programming to improve outcomes.
Content includes detailed examination of executive function profiles and their impact on behavior, with direct application to behavior analytic assessment, skill acquisition, and treatment planning. Participants will learn how deficits in executive functioning contribute to common clinical challenges such as limited generalization, low response rates, rigidity, and difficulty with multi-step or novel tasks.
Throughout the training, neuroanatomical and neuropsychological concepts are consistently linked to behavior analytic principles, with a focus on improving intervention effectiveness, increasing independence, and supporting generalization and maintenance of behavior change across settings.
Included Webinars
1. Autism Spectrum Disorder: Causes, Neurobiological Mechanisms and Controversies
Presenter: Dr. Goldberg
Length: 3 hours
This 3-hour webinar provides a comprehensive overview of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) with a focus on its genetic underpinnings, neurobiological mechanisms, and current controversies. Participants will gain an understanding of the highly heritable nature of ASD, including the role of rare high-impact mutations and common polygenic risk factors. The session explores critical neurobiological theories such as atypical synaptic pruning, excitation-inhibition imbalance, and microglial dysfunction, and highlights the stratification of ASD into biologically distinct subtypes using recent advances in genomics and machine learning. Environmental risk factors and regulatory guidance on debated exposures such as prenatal acetaminophen use are critically examined. The webinar bridges basic science discoveries with clinical implications, including genetic testing recommendations and the potential for targeted therapeutics.
2. Autism Spectrum Disorder: Neurocognitive Characteristics, Assessment and Therapies
Presenter: Dr. Goldberg
Length: 3 hours
This 3-hour webinar provides a focused overview of the neurocognitive characteristics, diagnostic assessment, and therapeutic approaches in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Building on sound understanding of neurobiological and syndromal foundations, this webinar emphasizes ASD as a behaviorally defined and highly heterogeneous spectrum, highlighting how core diagnostic features manifest across cognition, language, adaptive functioning, and psychiatric comorbidity. Participants will review DSM-5-TR diagnostic criteria and specifiers, key differential diagnoses across the lifespan, and characteristic neuropsychological profiles, including executive dysfunction, social cognition, and perceptual processing styles. The webinar reviews evidence-based assessment practices, emerging biomarkers, and current intervention models, while addressing lifespan outcomes, health disparities, and contemporary ethical and neurodiversity-related considerations.
3. Autism Beyond the Checklist: Phenotypes, Mimics, and Debates Shaping 2026
Presenter: Dr. Goldberg
Length: 3 hours
This 3-hour webinar moves beyond a checklist approach to ASD by focusing on diagnostic complexities and why an autism label can be correct but clinically incomplete. It introduces phenocopy logic and diagnostic overshadowing, showing how neurological, genetic, and medical conditions can mimic or reshape an autism-like presentation. Using phenotype-focused examples, it reviews common mimics and ASD-plus patterns, and how to think about EEG and MRI findings without over-interpreting incidental abnormalities. The session closes with the debates shaping 2026, including neurodiversity, ethics, and psychosocial trends, with practical guidance for communicating uncertainty while keeping recommendations actionable.
4. Executive Functions and the Frontal Lobes
Presenter: Dr. Goldberg
Length: 3 hours
Executive functions represent the highest level of cognitive control and involve goal formation, planning, mental flexibility, impulse control, and working memory. Executive functions are mediated by the prefrontal cortex and related structures. In this webinar, participants will examine their cognitive composition, neural mechanisms, changes throughout the lifespan, and gender differences. The webinar also examines how executive functions become impaired in a wide range of neurological, neuropsychiatric, neurodevelopmental, and neurogeriatric disorders.
5. Executive Function in Preschoolers
Presenter: Dr. Vanetta LaRosa
Length: 50 minutes
This 2-part on-demand webinar helps behavior analysts understand executive function development in preschool children and apply assessment findings to ABA treatment planning. The course focuses on early skills such as inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility, shifting, self-control, planning, emotional control, and task initiation.
Participants will review developmentally sensitive executive function tasks, including snack delay, gift delay, day and night tasks, bear and dragon tasks, Shape School, reverse categorization, multi-location search, and other performance-based measures. The webinar also connects preschool assessment data to ABA intervention mapping, including how tools such as the BRIEF-P, WPPSI, Leiter-3, Mullen Scales of Early Learning, PPVT, Vineland-3, and ADOS-2 can help identify learning entry points, prompting needs, instructional modality, communication targets, transition supports, and goals for independence.
6. Executive Dysfunction in Autism
Presenter: Dr. Vanetta LaRosa
Length: Approximately 76 minutes
This on-demand webinar helps behavior analysts understand the role of executive function in autism and how executive dysfunction can affect ABA intervention outcomes. The course emphasizes that planning, flexibility, inhibition, working memory, initiation, self-monitoring, organization, and emotional control are central to learning, adaptive behavior, and treatment response.
Participants will examine how executive functioning differences can contribute to rigidity, perseveration, transition difficulty, inconsistent responding, task initiation problems, weak self-monitoring, impulsivity, and limited generalization. The webinar reviews assessment tools such as the NEPSY-II, D-KEFS, Executive Control Battery, and Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function, then connects findings to ABA treatment planning, including goal selection, antecedent strategies, instructional design, prompting, reinforcement systems, task analysis, response inhibition, flexible thinking, and generalization programming.
7. From Function to Conditions: Integrating NEPSY-II Findings into ABA Decision-Making
Presenter: Dr. Vanetta LaRosa
Length: 65 minutes
The webinar examines how NEPSY-II findings can help BCBAs move from identifying the function of behavior to understanding the conditions under which behavior is most likely to occur. Participants will consider how attention, inhibition, shifting, language processing, working memory, memory, learning, and social perception can affect task demands, transitions, verbal instructions, prompt dependence, escape behavior, and instructional design.
Certificate Awarded
Advanced Certificate in Neuropsychological Applications to Applied Behavior Analysis
Note: This certificate reflects completion of advanced continuing education training and does not represent certification or licensure.