Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to examine how a child with autism inferred the near-future course of another person’s behavior, utilizing cues in the external environment, and how he initiated social behavior by drawing from these inferences. In Study 1, a 9-year-old boy with autism was trained to calculate another person’s rate of working on a task, and, from that, predict whether the other person could or could not finish the task within a time limit, that is, he learned reasoning. In Study 2, the same boy was instructed to assist the other person if the boy predicted that that person could not finish a task within the time limit. He was able to do this, using the reasoning that he had learned in Study 1. The present study showed the following : (a) the boy could learn to use as a stimulus a cue like working efficiency that is not a visible discriminative stimulus, (b) he could flexibly use various stimuli as discriminative stimuli, including the number of the other person’s responses, time, and the time limit, and (c) the boy’s helping behavior was affected by his reasoning.
