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as being happy, sad or frightening will depend, not only on the current context
but on the past history of the individual(s) involved. Moreover, facial expres-
sion alone may not always be a true representation of how someone is feeling -
a smile, for example maybe used in a brave attempt to disguise sadness or pain.
And, being able to recognize certain unambiguous emotions in other people,
may not necessarily help children with autism fully understand or cope with
their own emotional responses, especially if these differ from those of others.”
How might one help children in general, and children with autism in par-
ticular to become skilled story-tellers? Usually, for children growing up in a
social context, surrounded and encouraged by story-telling adults and other
children, and exposed to a variety of stories that are written, told or performed,
story-telling skills are part of normal development (Engel 1999), without nec-
essarily being explicitly taught. For children with autism, who were not able
to follow that 'normal' path that leads to becoming a skilled story-teller, story-
telling skills would have to be taught, explicitly, and in this sense 'artificially',
i.e. making things explicit that are normally 'picked up' in a social context. For
example, parents and peers do normally not tell a child explicitly 'remember
this', 'don't remember this'. The autism researcher Powell (Stuart Powell 1999,
pers. comm.) recommends that in teaching people with autism pointers have
to be given explicitly about what is important and useful (to remember) and
what is not, in this way helping them to structure their memory in order to
create autobiographical stories that they can tell.
In this section I discussed the importance of story-telling and autobiogra-
phy in the social and cognitive development of children. Systems that support
children's story-telling (e.g. as investigated in many projects part of the EU ini-
tiative Experimental School Environments (ESE), cf. (Machado et al. 1999),
(Bobick et al. 1999), (Benford et al. 2000)) might play an important role in a
story-oriented education for pre-school and older children. Such new
narrative
technology
can potentially meet the social and cognitive needs of young primate
story-tellers. This section also discussed how research in narrative intelligence
could potentially be applied to autism therapy.
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Narrative technology of this
kind needs to make narrative skills explicit, make the implicit visible, highlight
the underlying structure, point out (and possibly explain) what is important to
remember and what is not.
A new generation of humanoid robots might even be used in autism ther-
apy in order to test and teach social skills. Humphrey (1976:1988) argues for
the necessity of developing a laboratory test of 'social skill' for primates. His
suggestion is:
