Autistic children's responses to structure and to interpersonal demands

Ten autistic children were exposed to four different styles of approach by an adult, in which the common context was the child's involvement in the completion of a model-building task. These styles varied in the extent to which they made interpersonal demands of the child and in the amount of task-directed structure that was imposed. Measures based upon observation of the adult's and the children's behavior indicated that the styles applied were reliably discriminable, and that the children's responses, both social and task-directed, were positively related to the interpersonal and task-oriented demands that were made of them. Within the group of children tested, some individual differences in the responses to the styles were suggested that may be relevant to the diagnosis of autism.