Making Deception Fun: Teaching Autistic Individuals How to Play Friendly Tricks.

Area of Science:

• Social cognition
• Developmental psychology
• Autism spectrum disorder research

Background:

• Perspective-taking is crucial for social interaction and involves skills like deception.
• Autistic children often face challenges in understanding and using deception.
• Socially adaptive deception has practical applications in everyday life.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate a training procedure for teaching deception skills to autistic children and adolescents.
• To assess the effectiveness of multiple exemplar training, rules, modeling, practice, and feedback.
• To determine if learned deception skills generalize to untrained scenarios.

Main Methods:

• A multiple baseline across participants design was used.
• Four autistic children and adolescents participated in the study.
• The intervention involved multiple exemplar training, rules, modeling, practice, and feedback.

Main Results:

• The training procedure was successful for all four participants.
• Participants learned to use deception to play friendly tricks on others.
• Generalization of deception skills to novel, untrained tricks was achieved.

Conclusions:

• The evaluated intervention is effective in teaching social deception skills to autistic individuals.
• This training can enhance social navigation and interaction abilities in autistic children and adolescents.
• The findings support the use of targeted interventions to improve social-cognitive skills in autism.