This novel approach aims to merge the traditional autism research community with the researchers who study the reasoning and perception capabilities of humans and machines, which are actually corrupted under autism.

We target the introduction of ideas from computer science, artificial intelligence and mathematics on the possible mechanisms of reasoning to the autism practitioners. Autism phenomena needs the thorough study of autistic behavior and reasoning, backed by the strict representation of what it means to reason in a “normal” versus an autistic manner.

Computational autism in the news:

What is autism?

Autism is a developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life. The result of a neurological disorder that affects functioning of the brain, autism and its associated behaviors occur in approximately 3 of every 1000 individuals.

Autism interferes with the normal development of the brain in the areas of reasoning, social interaction and communication skills. Children and adults with autism typically have deficiencies in verbal and non-verbal communication, social interactions and leisure or play activities. The disorder makes it hard for them to communicate with others and relate to the outside world. They may exhibit repeated body movements (hand flapping, rocking), unusual responses to people or attachments to objects and resist any changes in routines. In some cases, aggressive and/or self-injurious behavior may be present.

    Does the above description of autism symptomotology sound like a set of bugs (or possibly even adaptive features) characteristic of a broken software system?  We think it does.  To put it more precisely, we believe that useful insights may be gained by viewing autism in humans via computational

How to find these bugs? Can one talk about fixing them?                           

Psychological, biological, linguistic loci of autism is very hard to find. It seems productive to focus on the reasoning-specific locus, that is more experimentally viable and can be done with higher strictness and accuracy at least for individual patients. Phenomena of computational autism is expected to provide a convincing background for both diagnosis and rehabilitation. The latter is connected with teaching autistic children the internals of mental world.

How hard is it to teach autistic children?

Indeed, it is very hard to reprogram. AI researchers know that it is always hard to make a software program to perform a behavioral thing that seems very natural and easy for humans. Indeed, it is frequently even harder to explain to an autistic child even the simplest possible mental reasoning act, to understand that other persons have wishes and how to know what is inside a bag.

At the same time, it is easier to introduce an autistic patient to a formal or mechanical word than to the mental one.

Why is it of interest to the CS & AI community?

We, the programmers and computer scientists, are all aware of how much sophistication have to be involved to teach a computer how  to accomplish certain simple physical, mental or perceptual tasks. These tasks stimulated development of rather abstract disciplines of formalisms-based AI, from nonmonotonic reasoning to frame problem, from formal grammars to simulation of speech acts.

     It is the case for autistic learning: it may be extremely hard to teach an autistic child to do something very basic from the usual perspective. So the special learning methodology comes into play.

Why are the advances in computational autism helpful for the patients?

Novel technology can directly target the corruption of reasoning means with high consistency, efficiency, and availability, freeing the parents and rehabilitation personnel from the routine training responsibilities.

What will result from merging the psychological and computer science efforts on autistic training?

Software rehabilitation means:

• Question-answering system
• Mental simulator, stimulating the creative thinking and orientation in an emergent situation; understanding
• Mechanical robot for development of spatial orientation

Is there direct link between autism and logic?

Because children with Asperger’s Syndrome tend to be logical thinkers it is tempting to try and use logic to argue them out of their autism. I know. I have been there with my son. Believe me. It does not work like that! If it did we would have cured Asperger’s Syndrome by now.

Accepting that the mental reasoning is one of the central issues in autistic phenomena, what is exactly corrupted under autism: axioms vs rules of inference, knowledge structure vs access to memory etc.?

This question was communicated by M.Minsky, AAAI FSS 99 on Simulation of Human Agents. Autistic reasoning can be described in terms of pure/applied calculi, logic/non-logic (domain-specific) axioms, prepositional / first-order / second order axioms and rules of inference. Hence, since autistic children can satisfactorily apply the rules of inference in the domains other than mental, we conclude than mental axioms (e.g. BDI model) is what should be blamed.

 People with autism have troubles relating to people.  What they need is more contacts with people.  Why do we want them to sit in front of computers any more than they already do?

Usually, when both human and automatic agents learn, they first need to be introduced to the principles / rules of the new domain, and then have a set of training samples. This is the case for autistic rehabilitation: children have to be first taught the principles of the construction of mental world and its inhabitants, and then have a practice with interaction with them. In contrast to normal children, autistic ones have already failed to adjust themselves to the real mental world, and a computer environment serves as a means to introduce the principles of understanding mental world. After the basics are acquired, autistic children are encouraged to develop mental skills practicing with other people rather than with a computer.

We may proceed, considering human and automatic agents from the uniform prospective…

Related projects

1. Aurora
2. Neural network models and autism
3. Ventral neural network are at the origin of the core social symptoms of autism
4. Prosopagnosia (difficulty or inability to recognize faces) and autism
5. EEG in autistic and normal subjects
6. Modeling deficits in autism (A computational framework for studying developmental disorders, a connectionist model of atypical categorization in autism, a connectionist model of theory-of-mind deficits in autism)

No real fear

  

  

of dangers

Directions in applications of logic to autism phenomena

• Extending the BDI model to accelerate the mental development of autistic patients
• Learning the axiomatic reasoning about mental states assists the emotional development of the autistic patients.
• Simulating autistic patients as agents with corrupted reasoning about mental states.
• Question-answering system for teaching autistic children to reason about mental states.

More references on autism and neural networks model / experiment processing

Cohen, I. L. (1998). Neural network analysis of learning in autism. In D. Stein and J. Ludick (Eds.) Neural networks and psychopathology, pp. 274-315. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gustafsson, L. (1997). Inadequate cortical feature maps: A neural circuit theory of autism. Biological Psychiatry, 42, 1138-1147.

O’Loughlin. C. & Thagard, P. (2000). Autism and coherence: A computational model. Mind & Language, 15, 375-392.

Townsend, J., Westerfield, M., Leaver, E., Makeig, S., Jung, T-P., Pierce, K. & Courchesne, E. Abnormalities of topography and composition of ERP response in autism during spatial attention (.pdf, 1.4Mb). Cognitive Brain Research 11:127-145, 2001.

Oliver, A., Johnson, M. H., Karmiloff-Smith, A., & Pennington, B. (2000). Deviations in the emergence of representations: A neuro-constructivist framework for analysing developmental disorders. Developmental Science, 3, 1-23.