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high-functioning people with autism can learn and train themselves in social
behavior to some extent, by learning and applying generic rules of human in-
teraction, although they usually fail to recognize idiosyncratic social cues (i.e.
they fail to construct another person's individual biographic history). Thus, we
can expect that when people with autism are confronted with a complex 'so-
cial story' (enacted by actors in movies or comics, or by normal people in real
life), that the more 'human-like' the actors in a story are, the more sophisti-
cated their behavior is, i.e. the more biographical reconstruction of the story
is required, the more difficulty people with autism will have in understanding
the story.
Children with autism need structure in their lives, they prefer to stick to
a fixed daily routine, and they have difficulty to remember and describe what
actually happened to them, in contrast to what usually happens to them. These
attributes are reminiscent of Nelson's evidence that the memory of preschool
children is structured around the usual, routine episodes, until children be-
come skilled story-tellers. This indicates an impairment of narrative skills in
children with autism, in particular those narratives which are special and indi-
vidual and which contribute to autobiographical memory. One reason for the
difficulties people with autism have in relating, understanding and commu-
nicating with other people might therefore lie in an impairment of narrative,
story-telling skills, i.e. an impairment of the ability to represent the charac-
teristic narrative shape of human action and interaction (Bruner & Feldman
1993). From early childhood on, through transactions with others, e.g. in mu-
tual imitation games (Nadel et al. 1999), children learn the 'narrative format'
of human interaction, an important milestone in the development of a child's
understanding of other minds (cf. discussion in Jordan (1999)). Humans are
not only mental agents , they are agents with a history, autobiographic agents,
interlinked with the histories of other agents in the social field. Social under-
standing requires an autobiographic agent which is able to re-construct its own
and other people's experiences, an agent with a history, an agent which has a
body as the point of reference which gives a unique perspective on the (so-
cial) world, which allows one to generalize from experiences and to reconstruct
specific, individual experiences.
Interestingly, Howlin et al. (1999) who developed a cartoon-based practical
guide to teaching children with autism to mindread, pointed towards the im-
portance of social context and history in teaching social understanding to chil-
dren with autism: “Understanding - and reacting appropriately to - people's
emotions, involves more than the ability to recognize a few clear and relatively
simple emotions from pictures and cartoons. Whether a situation is construed
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