Jaswal & Akhtar (J&A) rightly question the normocentric credit given to appearance when modeling autistic atypical social behaviors, stating that they are motivated by the same factors that would have motivated them, if observed in a non-autistic person. J&A's argument challenges the rationale of the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM), an intervention package that focuses on enriching the exposure to the typical markers of non-autistic social reciprocity. The ESDM rationale assumes that if a non-autistic child lacks certain social behaviors in the early stages of life, it would predict a lack of normal social interaction when they are older. However, intensively occupying an autistic childhood with the training of non-autistic prerequisites is the human equivalent of training a kitten to swim. It has a dubious usefulness for the future quality of life. Instead, we prefer the assumption that autistics act socially the way they do because they have a distinctive expression of their sociality – and, specifically, another theory of non-autistic minds. In the field of intervention, this neurodiverse position leads to replacing overtly interactive sessions by lateral tutorship and furthering free accessibility to rule-governed material. When a child thus manipulates complex material chosen among interests close to this child, without prompting or reinforcing overt markers of typical interaction (e.g., direct gaze), it creates opportunities for incidental learning and an increased gain in expertise acquisition. It also offers to the child a matrix of actual (and not fake or non-autistic) interaction between two human beings who express their social bonding differently.
J&A, however, could have pushed their argument much further. Distancing oneself from a normocentric interpretation of overt autistic behaviors is even especially urgent with regard to the appearance of purposeless and non-compliant behaviors during psychological assessments. Taking this appearance at face value for intellectual disability routinely leads to underestimating the testability of autistic children. However, in a substantial number of cases, these same children actually reveal non-verbal intelligence in the normal range. A lack of inclusive approaches to testing is itself a barrier, rather than the ability of the autistic youth (Courchesne et al. Reference Courchesne, Meilleur, Poulin-Lord, Dawson and Soulières2015).
A similar overhaul of the way the entire set of autistic restricted interests and repetitive behaviors (RIRBs) are interpreted through a normocentric lens is thus urgently required to challenge their apparent purposelessness. Here also, J&A's critique of the prevailing interpretation of RIRBs stops halfway, but a deep refounding of RIRBs is justified. They underline correctly how some RIRBs are the consequence of autistics' lack of access to information. We proposed to call those RIRBs, like rocking, captivity behaviors – as they are poorly specific to autism. But even more crucially, some other RIRBs (which we term intense exploratory behaviors), for instance, the prolonged fixation upon certain objects, may have a learning purpose in addition to being highly specific to autism. Continuing with J&A's target article, we therefore propose, as a guide for future research on RIRBs, that the role and function of pretend play – a prerequisite for the future mastering of possible words and conditional reasoning in non-autistic children – is reflected in autistics by intense inspection and manipulation of objects of interest.
Consequently, focusing interventions on the typical prerequisites for learning – the “learn to learn” dogma centering behaviorist approaches – is based on a superficial, normocentric interpretation of autistic overt behaviors associated with learning. An apparent lack of interest for non-social information, combined with the orientation toward a narrowly defined class of objects without apparent purpose, does not preclude incidental or implicit learning of the rules governing these objects of interest (Mottron Reference Mottron2017). Understanding intense autistic interests as a manifestation of human intelligence in conditions of impoverished access to complex information, is a long way from classifying hyperlexia or calendar calculations in the Barnum Circus of savant abilities. And among those, the spontaneous, precocious, obsessive, self-taught interest for written code, once taken for a useless manifestation of “islets of abilities” (in a sea of ignorance?), may in fact represent an autistic way to approach language. The high prevalence of advanced orientation toward letters and numbers in prototypical autism, as suggested by systematic investigations of the published cases of hyperlexia may represent the autistic “voie royale,” leading to a future of mastering linguistic function (Ostrolenk et al. Reference Ostrolenk, Forgeot d'Arc, Jelenic, Samson and Mottron2017). Language in autism may, simply, not be primarily learnt through communicative events, or for communicative purposes.
In the recent history of the scientific study of the human mind, behaviorism – a pseudoscience of appearance – has been succeeded by the cognitive neurosciences, which not only rely on hidden cognitive concepts but also reify them. This later paradigm leads unfortunately to a medical model of autism, that is, to a present versus absent or, barely better, to a more versus less causal modeling of atypical behaviors. If one wants to integrate a scientific content to the generous neurodiverse perspective, diversifying the interpretation of the apparent absence of typical behavior in human variants is the next step required to be delivered from normocentric biases.
Jaswal & Akhtar (J&A) rightly question the normocentric credit given to appearance when modeling autistic atypical social behaviors, stating that they are motivated by the same factors that would have motivated them, if observed in a non-autistic person. J&A's argument challenges the rationale of the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM), an intervention package that focuses on enriching the exposure to the typical markers of non-autistic social reciprocity. The ESDM rationale assumes that if a non-autistic child lacks certain social behaviors in the early stages of life, it would predict a lack of normal social interaction when they are older. However, intensively occupying an autistic childhood with the training of non-autistic prerequisites is the human equivalent of training a kitten to swim. It has a dubious usefulness for the future quality of life. Instead, we prefer the assumption that autistics act socially the way they do because they have a distinctive expression of their sociality – and, specifically, another theory of non-autistic minds. In the field of intervention, this neurodiverse position leads to replacing overtly interactive sessions by lateral tutorship and furthering free accessibility to rule-governed material. When a child thus manipulates complex material chosen among interests close to this child, without prompting or reinforcing overt markers of typical interaction (e.g., direct gaze), it creates opportunities for incidental learning and an increased gain in expertise acquisition. It also offers to the child a matrix of actual (and not fake or non-autistic) interaction between two human beings who express their social bonding differently.
J&A, however, could have pushed their argument much further. Distancing oneself from a normocentric interpretation of overt autistic behaviors is even especially urgent with regard to the appearance of purposeless and non-compliant behaviors during psychological assessments. Taking this appearance at face value for intellectual disability routinely leads to underestimating the testability of autistic children. However, in a substantial number of cases, these same children actually reveal non-verbal intelligence in the normal range. A lack of inclusive approaches to testing is itself a barrier, rather than the ability of the autistic youth (Courchesne et al. Reference Courchesne, Meilleur, Poulin-Lord, Dawson and Soulières2015).
A similar overhaul of the way the entire set of autistic restricted interests and repetitive behaviors (RIRBs) are interpreted through a normocentric lens is thus urgently required to challenge their apparent purposelessness. Here also, J&A's critique of the prevailing interpretation of RIRBs stops halfway, but a deep refounding of RIRBs is justified. They underline correctly how some RIRBs are the consequence of autistics' lack of access to information. We proposed to call those RIRBs, like rocking, captivity behaviors – as they are poorly specific to autism. But even more crucially, some other RIRBs (which we term intense exploratory behaviors), for instance, the prolonged fixation upon certain objects, may have a learning purpose in addition to being highly specific to autism. Continuing with J&A's target article, we therefore propose, as a guide for future research on RIRBs, that the role and function of pretend play – a prerequisite for the future mastering of possible words and conditional reasoning in non-autistic children – is reflected in autistics by intense inspection and manipulation of objects of interest.
Consequently, focusing interventions on the typical prerequisites for learning – the “learn to learn” dogma centering behaviorist approaches – is based on a superficial, normocentric interpretation of autistic overt behaviors associated with learning. An apparent lack of interest for non-social information, combined with the orientation toward a narrowly defined class of objects without apparent purpose, does not preclude incidental or implicit learning of the rules governing these objects of interest (Mottron Reference Mottron2017). Understanding intense autistic interests as a manifestation of human intelligence in conditions of impoverished access to complex information, is a long way from classifying hyperlexia or calendar calculations in the Barnum Circus of savant abilities. And among those, the spontaneous, precocious, obsessive, self-taught interest for written code, once taken for a useless manifestation of “islets of abilities” (in a sea of ignorance?), may in fact represent an autistic way to approach language. The high prevalence of advanced orientation toward letters and numbers in prototypical autism, as suggested by systematic investigations of the published cases of hyperlexia may represent the autistic “voie royale,” leading to a future of mastering linguistic function (Ostrolenk et al. Reference Ostrolenk, Forgeot d'Arc, Jelenic, Samson and Mottron2017). Language in autism may, simply, not be primarily learnt through communicative events, or for communicative purposes.
In the recent history of the scientific study of the human mind, behaviorism – a pseudoscience of appearance – has been succeeded by the cognitive neurosciences, which not only rely on hidden cognitive concepts but also reify them. This later paradigm leads unfortunately to a medical model of autism, that is, to a present versus absent or, barely better, to a more versus less causal modeling of atypical behaviors. If one wants to integrate a scientific content to the generous neurodiverse perspective, diversifying the interpretation of the apparent absence of typical behavior in human variants is the next step required to be delivered from normocentric biases.