AUTISTIC children can be taught to interact more naturally with other people simply by 鈥減rogramming鈥� 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. 鈥淚f you take it to the extreme it sounds unethical because you are training them to perform unnaturally,鈥� he says. 鈥淏ut if it works then I think it鈥檚 a good way forward.鈥�
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Autistic people generally find it difficult to comprehend the mental states of others. 鈥淔or example, they don鈥檛 know what it means to pretend,鈥� Galitsky says. Yet they can be particularly adept at understanding formulaic rules. Galitsky鈥檚 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 鈥渨ant鈥� and 鈥渒now鈥�. He then used them to derive more complex mental states normally beyond the children鈥檚 grasp.
In a basic example, Galitsky may tell Peter, who has autism, that 鈥淛ane knows something鈥�. This is expressed as 鈥渒now(Jane, something)鈥�. 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 it sounds confusing, but claims this isn鈥檛 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鈥檚 ability to recognise certain mental states before and after training.
He found that the children could easily take these rules, and generalise from them to interact in a similar way to children who are not autistic. If you show them the rule for pretend, he says, 鈥渢hen they pretty much start pretending鈥�.
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 specialising in computational linguistics based in Massachusetts and Moscow, hopes that the children will start to derive their own rules as they encounter new, 鈥渦nknown鈥� mental states.