Taken from the article “Autism: From
Mind Blindness to Context Blindness”
By
Peter Vermeulen.
Nov/Dec 2011 Autism Asperger’s Digest www.autismdigest.com
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Remember the scene in the movie, Rainman,
where Raymond is trying to cross a street? In Raymond’s mind when the sign
displays “Don’t walk,” it means only one thing: “Don’t walk.” We laugh when the
sign changes from “Walk” to “Don’t walk” and Raymond stops in the middle of the
intersection. Raymond does not
understand that “Don’t walk” means many different things, depending on the
situation or context. When you’re halfway through the crossing, it means “hurry
up” instead!
Here is another example of context blindness: When the doorbell rang,
the mother of a seven-year-old boy with autism asked him to open the door. He
opened the back door instead of the front. His reaction was logical, but his
choice of door was out of context.
Emotion recognition training is immensely popular in the field of
autism. Typical materials used in this training are photographs or pictures of
facial expressions of emotions. 
Although these materials can help children with autism learn about
different emotions in a rote manner, they do not reflect emotion recognition as
it happens in real life.
First, we rarely see faces out of context in real life. When we try to
figure out what a person feels, we look at context as much as we do facial
expression: the situation, what that person says, body language, our past
experiences with similar situations, etc. In fact we don’t even need a facial
expression to recognize emotions. Even without a facial expression you
certainly know how the man in the photo at feels, based on the context. Studies
on how people process facial expressions have shown that when we look at faces,
our brains always spontaneously encode the context and that in certain
instances, context plays an even bigger role in emotion recognition than the
facial expression.
The second problem with traditional emotion recognition training is the
underlying assumption that there is a direct relationship between an emotion
and its facial expression. This assumption goes back to Darwin’s idea of
universal expression of emotions in which each emotion has its own distinct
facial expression. Unfortunately for people with autism, facial expressions are
not that straightforward and quite often are ambiguous. Take tears for
instance. What do people feel when they have tears on their cheeks? It could
mean sadness. But it could also mean happiness or pride. Or it could be an
allergic reaction or the result of dicing an onion. How can a brain tell the
difference? It uses context.
In recognizing emotions—the same is true for all mental states—the human
brain relies on context. When people with autism find it hard to empathize, it
is because their brain lacks contextual sensitivity. They are affected by
context blindness, rather than mind blindness.
We can teach people with ASD a lot of rules and scripts, but for social
understanding and competence to flourish, scripts and rules are insufficient.
To effectively teach emotion recognition and social understanding to people
with ASD, we must add context to the materials we teach. Even using a term such
as “socially appropriate behavior” becomes misleading unless context is
specified; behavior that is socially appropriate in one situation might be
inappropriate in another context!
Social competence is not about knowing whether a certain behavior is
socially appropriate or not, it is the knowledge of when that behavior is appropriate and when it is not.
Research has shown that more able people with ASD know quite a lot of
social rules, but they have difficulty adapting these rules to changing
contexts or making exceptions to the rules. Most social skill training programs
focus on teaching generic social
skills (e.g., how to start a conversation). However, having a conversation
while waiting in the dentist’s waiting room or visiting someone at the hospital
is quite different from the conversation you have hanging out with a group of
buddies because the contexts are very different.
Instead of putting our focus on teaching social skills, we should focus
on teaching social contexts such as visiting someone at the hospital or hanging
out with friends. And then teach all the necessary rules, conversation, and
behavior attached to a certain context. When you visit someone who is ill and
in the hospital, what kind of present do you take? How long do you stay? What
do you talk about? What should you say/not say?
The same logic about context applies to Social Stories™, a powerful tool
to help people with autism navigate the social world. Instead of creating
stories about certain social skills, we should build them around contexts and
introduce sentences that start with if
and when. In this manner a story can
be adapted to different contexts. For instance, a social story about welcoming
guests to your birthday party could contain the following contextual sentences:
- When the person who arrives is a close family member, you kiss them and say “hi.”
- When the person who arrives is not a close family member, you shake hands and say “hi.”
Social
competence requires more than social skills; it demands contextual sensitivity—
something difficult for people with ASD. Training programs designed to help
people with ASD navigate the social world should therefore emphasize social
contexts, not just focus on teaching social skills.
Peter Vermeulen, PhD, is a
senior lecturer and consultant at Autisme Centraal in Gent, Belgium. He has
written 15 books on autism, some of which have been translated into several
languages.
