Developing learning model and software for rehabilitation of autistic reasoning

Project summary

It has been confirmed by multiple experimental studies that children with autism, from mild to severe forms, are lacking communication skills. Also, it has become clear that the traditional educational aids and learning methodologies such as copying behaviour of other people, learning while playing or while interacting with others are not effective.

       Usually the skills of understanding others and supporting conversations are developed while communicating with other people in a variety of forms, which is not the case of children with autism. Being eager to interact with other people, they are frequently missing the very basic skills which cannot be developed by means of a regular practice of interactions with other people. A good analogy here is that it is usually too hard to learn a new foreign language if one just finds herself in a foreign country: some initial clarification is required (at least an alphabet and a few terms for initial conversation).

        Similarly, autistic children (especially severe cases) are finding a lot of difficulties to initiate conversation because they are missing understanding of the very fundamental entities of intentions and knowledge of others and of the overall communication discourse. Therefore, the focus of rehabilitation strategy for autistic children is an introduction of explicit rules for how to communicate, starting with the notions of intention, knowledge and belief.

      Since autistic children better acquire entities of the physical world than of the mental world, a physical analogy of knowing and wanting should be used, up to drawing a captured objects in a person’s brain. After a rehabilitation therapist achieved adequate answering of questions such as “do you know what is in her bag” and “what is his intention now?”, the next step is to explain the notions of deception and pretend, followed by offending and forgiving, and more complex forms of behaviour etc. The efficiency of this strategy has been demonstrated: a number of children who have undergone the above training are currently in a regular (not SEN) school, communicating with others reasonably well and sometimes associating their observations with the reasoning exercises they have completed.

     The current proposal is focussed on scaling up the suggested rehabilitation strategy, to make it available for a wide international audience. Currently, only the children who attend the Rehabilitation Centre “Sunny World” take advantage of this training, as well as other children whose families established communication with the author. At this time, the parents’ familiarity with the software and certain concepts of reasoning is required to conduct the training sessions. The goal of the proposed project is to further develop the underlying model of reasoning about mental attitudes and to implement it as online software readily available for children with autism and their parents throughout the world.

    Why it is so hard to the psychological community to perform the training of the basic reasoning about mental states to assist autistic communication? This is due to the fact that to accomplish an effective training, a rehabilitation strategist needs to have a substantial experience of teaching very basic (which are, indeed, formal) forms of reasoning about mental attitudes. Teaching normal children, it is hard to get such experience because by the time they are verbal, these children are already quite good at communication. Therefore, only computer scientists, who are struggling to program reasoning about mental attitudes into computers, are able to share their experience in developing explanations on how to reason in such the domain. In terms of background knowledge of what mental attitudes are, autistic children are almost as beginners as computers. Hence an efficient and flexible learning strategy for children with autism can be developed only under collaboration between psychologists and computer scientists.