Stories of lemurs and robots - Narrative Intelligence - page 79

for the marble. This short story can be presented to the children in a variety
of formats, e.g. told verbally with/without objects and cartoons, enacted with
puppets or human beings etc. Normal children until the age of four and most
autistic children (of all ages) give 'Anne's box' as the answer, i.e. they cannot
attribute to Sally a different belief then they have themselves (and they know
that the marble is now in Anne's box). Tests like the Sally-Anne test require you
to be able to distinguish yourself and your beliefs and perceptions from those
of others: what I {know, believe, perceive, feel} is not necessarily identical with
what you {know, believe, perceive, feel}. This ability is not innate; children de-
velop this ability during their first years of life. By the age of 3-4 years a child's
theory-of-mind is usually well developed, while most children with autism will
not succeed at this. The term 'theory-of-mind' has recently been replaced by
the term mind-reading , in order to express that the skill to understand the so-
cial world is not necessarily theory-based (e.g. based on a set of axioms and
logical rules). Moreover, interpersonal processes of joint attention and/or em-
pathy are alternative approaches to understanding autism, see discussion e.g.
in (Dautenhahn 1997). Failure of children with autism to pass the Sally-Anne
test has usually been interpreted as a failure in the development of theory-of-
mind or mindreading skills, cf. (Baron-Cohen 1995). However, as I will discuss
in this section, an alternative explanation for such a failure, although related
to mindreading skills, could lie in a failure to properly interpret, re-construct
and understand stories , thus indicating an impairment of narrative capacities
in children with autism, as suggested by psychologists such as Jerome Bruner
and Carol Feldman (Bruner & Feldman 1993).
According to the developmental psychologist Katherine Nelson (Nelson
1986) children experience their day as a series of scripts (as suggested in
(Schank & Abelson 1977)) and routines which help them to structure their
world of experiences and language. Scripts help them to understand what is
going to happen and who is going to do what. Nelson's evidence demonstrates
the primacy of scripts as an organizing tool for children. However, as Bruner
points out (Bruner 1991), narratives require scripts as necessary background
(the skeleton ), but they do not constitute narrativity itself. Scripts are not worth
telling unless they include the unusual , breaches, violations to the script which
make a story interesting. Thus, children only become true story-tellers once
they can create and remember stories about the unusual, the specific, events
and experiences that contribute to their unique and individual autobiography.
Interestingly, some people with autism show animal empathy (i.e. they can
'understand' the behavior and feelings of animals, (Grandin 1995)), so a mech-
anism of empathic resonance (with animals) seems to exist. Moreover, some