Association for Behavior Analysis International

This symposium presents recent research related to teaching perspective-taking skills to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The first paper analyzes the effects of in-vivo teaching procedures, multiple exemplar training, and a visual perspective teaching procedure in a multiple-probe across participants design to teach children with ASD, with limited language repertoires, to view the visual perspective of others. The second paper presents data on teaching children with ASD the perspective-taking skill of identifying what they and others know and do not know, and to explain how their knowledge was obtained or why it was not obtained via sensory perspective-taking (i.e., seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling, etc.), within a multiple baseline across participants design. The final paper evaluates the effects of video-based instruction on teaching a generalized problem solving strategy within and across false-belief categories for shared and differing perspective-taking with individuals with ASD in a multiple-probe across participants design.

BCBAs and other certified or licensed professionals.

A prerequisite skill related to the development of perspective taking skills is recognizing that others may have access to different visual information, which is known as visual perspective taking (Howlin, Baron-Cohen, & Hadwin, 1999). There is limited behavior analytic research on methods to teach children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) visual perspective taking. The purpose of the present study was to analyze the effects of in-vivo teaching procedures, multiple exemplar training, and a visual perspective teaching procedure in a multiple-probe across participants design to teach children with ASD to view the perspective of others. Four experimenter-defined categories (i.e., line of sight, item appearance, array appearance, and item rotation) were used to teach perspective taking skills. The results demonstrated low levels of visual perspective taking in the baseline conditions with participants quickly demonstrating mastery criterion after intervention was introduced. Interobserver-agreement and procedure integrity data were taken on at least 50% of the sessions across all conditions and were 90% or better. This study contributed to the existing literature by providing more information on procedures for teaching visual perspective taking to children with ASD that have limited language repertoires.

Perspective-taking skills such as predicting the future behavior of others based upon their beliefs and creating false beliefs in others for the purpose of adaptive deceptive behaviors such as keeping secrets and surprises and bluffing during games requires one to be able to identify what information others know and do not know (e.g., she does not know we are having a surprise birthday party for her, so she thinks nobody remembers her birthday). The current study evaluated the effects of a multiple exemplar training package that included rules, error correction, and reinforcement on teaching children with autism to identify and explain information that is known and unknown to themselves and others based on each individual’s perspective across the five senses (i.e., she knows or does not know because she can or cannot see, taste, feel, hear, or smell the relevant stimulus). Results of this study thus far indicate that the treatment package was effective in teaching the first of three participants to identify known and unknown information of self and others, as well as how such knowledge was obtained or why it was not obtained. Furthermore, generalization across untrained stimuli and people was observed during posttraining.

The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of using video-based instruction to teach a generalized problem-solving strategy for perspective taking. Specifically, four participants with autism spectrum disorder were taught (a) a rule and when to use it to assist in the identification of shared or differing information and (b) to use that information to respond to perspective taking questions embedded in videos. Multiple exemplars of shared and differing perspective scenarios were used to promote differential responding to shared and differing perspective tasks, and generalized problem solving within and across false-belief categories (i.e., false identity, unexpected location, misidentified object). Responses were assessed during in-vivo probes of false-belief and shared-belief tasks. After learning the problem-solving strategy, all four participants responded correctly to trained and novel shared- and false-belief tasks. Strategy used generalized to within and across category video and in-vivo probes. Generalization was also observed in everyday contexts.