Date of Defense

5-19-2000

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Dr. Linda A. LeBlanc

Second Advisor

Dr. Scott Kollins

Third Advisor

Angela Telfer

Abstract

'Theory of mind' is the ability to appreciate one's own perspective and to conceive that other people have their own perspectives (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). Typically, perspective-taking skills develop gradually by age 3 or 4 (Klinger & Dawson, 1996). Various perspective-taking tasks have been developed to assess these skills. Previous studies have shown that the majority of children with autism are unable to pass such tasks, thereby demonstrating that individuals diagnosed with autism have a specific deficit in perspective-taking (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985; Leslie & Frith, 1989). Understanding another person's perspective may have an impact on one's ability to understand and predict the behavior of others and perform appropriately in social situations (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1986; Baron-Cohen, 1989). The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effectiveness of video modeling in teaching perspective taking skills to children with autism and to assess generalization of these new skills to untrained tasks. Two male children diagnosed with autism participated in the study. Results suggest that video modeling was an effect training procedure for teaching subjects to correctly respond to the perspective-taking tasks. In addition, both subjects demonstrated some degree of generalization to untrained perspective-taking tasks.

Access Setting

Honors Thesis-Campus Only

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