Monday, October 15, 2018

Reading the Research: Labeled Learning

Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today's article demonstrates the power of labels, and the innate tendency of humans to gravitate to them and use them.  In a world where labels like "autistic," "special needs," and "high functioning/low functioning" exist, it's important to know that this tendency can't simply be overridden or schooled away from people.  Mostly, though, this teaching method has real potential for teaching the "hidden curriculum" that autistic people tend to miss.  

So, as I was reading this article, which is mainly about teaching babies how to recognize made up categories of objects, it occurred to me that the same kind of learning could potentially be done with older children and, say, facial expressions.  

So, you'd point the person's attention to a TV show, and mark the first few happy expressions for them.  Or angry expressions, or sad expressions, or embarrassed expressions.  And then see how well they pick up on subsequent examples of that expression.  You could start with animated shows, for simplicity, and work up to live action shows.  

With sufficiently advanced graphics processing, excellent software, and something like Google Glass, the same idea could be handled in real time.  Naturally, emotions recognition is just a small part of the hidden curriculum, but it's an important one.  Having a video series or a computer program to literally teach what each emotion tends to look like would be a good step towards making life easier for autistic people.

I can see the same thing working for verbal responses and context with older children and teenagers.  You could teach sarcasm this way, by noting the context around the sarcastic sentence and then noting that the sentence was sarcastic.  The person could learn to make those same calculations in their head, given time and practice.  

I expect this wouldn't be a surefire teaching technique for every autistic person, but the urge to categorize is strong in humans, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was at least somewhat useful to most learning styles.  

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