Teaching children with Asperger's syndrome to respond to I-You, Here-There, and Now-Then perspectives-taking frames.

Abstract

Perspective-taking, the ability to respond based on information about oneself and others, is an important part of social interactions. Children who are diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often lack perspective-taking, and this deficit can detrimentally impact the quality of their social interactions. In recent years, a behavioral account of language and cognition, Relational Frame Theory, has taught various levels of perspective-taking complexity. Simple, reversed, and double reversed relations, through targeting, I-You, Here-There, and Now-Then relations have been established using the Barnes-Holmes protocol. To date, the training protocol has been evaluated using typically developing individuals and has yet to be used for individuals with perspective-taking deficits. The current study extends pervious research by teaching children with ASD perspective-taking relations, evaluating the influence of teaching on generalized responding, and briefly evaluating the impact of individualized training on perspective-taking acquisition, using the Barnes-Holmes protocol. Participants included three boys ranging from nine to ten years old, diagnosed with Asperger's. Findings indicated that only one participant was able to master simple, reversed, and double reversed perspective-taking relations using the training protocol. Additionally, acquiring simple, reversed, and double reversed perspective-taking relations did not consistently result in acquisition of untrained responses across participants. Finally, preliminary findings indicate individualization of training protocols may be necessary for promoting acquisition of perspective-taking relations.