Magazine: “NewScientist”
20 July 2002
AUTISM
Hope
lies in flair for logic
AUTISTIC children can be taught to interact more naturally with other people simply by “programming” them to understand how other people think.
The technique, invented by Russian researcher Boris Galitsky, exploits the aptitude of many people with autism to understand logical formulae. Galitsky claims it has already helped 10 autistic children lead more normal lives.
The technique makes sense, says Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, as there is anecdotal evidence that autistic people often create their own logical rules to help them interact with others. “If you take it to the extreme it sound unethical because you are training them to perform unnaturally,” he says. “But if it works then I think it’s a good way forward.”
Autistic people generally find it difficult to comprehend the mental states of others. “For example, they don’t know what it means to pretend,” Galitsky says. Yet they can be particularly adept at understanding formulaic rules. Galitsky’s technique, which he calls computational autism, tries to exploit this talent.
Working with children at Sunny World school in Moscow, Galitsky started with rules that use mental states familiar to autistic people, such as “want” and “know”. He then used them to derive more complex mental states normally beyond the children’s grasp.
In a basic example, Galitsky may tell Peter, who has autism, that “Jane knows something”. This is expressed as “know(Jane, something)”. These – logical units are then built up into compound formulae to derive more complex expressions such as to inform, deceive, explain, forgive and pretend (see Graphic).
Galitsky admits that is sounds confusing, but claims this isn’t a problem for children with autism. His technique involves repeating particular rules with different variables. In trials presented last month to the International Conference on Development and Learning in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he assessed the children’s ability to recognise certain mental states before and after training.
He found that the children could easily take these rules, and generalize from them to interact in a similar way to children who are not autistic. If you show them the rule for pretend, he says, “then they pretty much start pretending”.
Galitsky tailors training sessions to individual children, as the abilities of people with autism can differ widely. Some respond better to verbal instructions, while others prefer the rules to be written down.
Galitsky, who works for Knowledge-Trail, a start-up specializing in computational linguistics based in Massachusetts and Moscow, hopes that the children will start to derive their own rules as they encounter new, “unknown” mental states.
~Duncan
Graham-Rowe~
How an autistic child learns that Mike is pretending to Jane