Question for my #actuallyautistic peeps -- my son is also autistic, 7 yrs old, and seems to almost have object permanence issues? Like if he doesn't hear or see something he insists it didn't happen. Even if I'm saying "yes, I heard this" he'll say "no, you're wrong, it didn't happen."
Has anyone experienced something similar? How can I support his experience of the world while helping him understand that things outside his direct experience can still be real?
@jessmahler has he had an opportunity to learn "I perceived" as a concept? It sounds like he has understood "X happened" as equivalent to "I perceived X" and if he learns the latter then he has a way to understand a difference between "I perceived" and "X happened" because they now exist as separate concepts
@Kistaro Thank you! No he hadn't. We had a brief talk about "I perceived..." and what perception is and how sometimes you can know something happened even if you don't perceive it. We didn't connect it directly to earlier discussion, but he has the idea now so we'll see what happens going forward.
@jessmahler Yay! And then if you need to show the difference, performing things he can't see but can know happened - like showing a piece of paper, bringing it under the table, folding it in half, then bringing it back out - can give him chances to think about the difference between "happened" and "perceived". Be careful, he's going to get really fascinated with figuring out things he can't perceive and suddenly 20 years later he has a microbiology degree
@Kistaro @jessmahler Do you by any chance have an idea for this demonstration only for a blind person? (Asking others, esp. blind folk as well) You’d need to follow (acoustically or by touch?) somehow, but then you are perceiving again. I cannot find another example where you don’t necessarily have to trust others. What could be an equivalent to this “It happens under the desk and you know that nothing else is happening” (like a person trying to manipulate/gaslight you)?
@lila @jessmahler Fold the paper while the student is touching it, feeling it bend, and feeling the crease form; repeat a couple of times and talk about the nature of folding paper. Then introduce, by touch, another sheet of paper; crimp the edge using the student's hands, or have the student do so. Then take it and quietly fold it in half (maybe quarters) yourself, hand it back, and talk about what must have happened, even though it could not be directly perceived?
@jessmahler @lila Oh, I forgot part of my explanation - crimping the corner is so that the student can feel that this is the same piece of paper, by finding the familiar crimp in the otherwise differently-shaped paper. Other tactile marks would work as well.
@Kistaro Thank you! This might really work for us 😀
@lila @jessmahler (also don't mistake me for a real professional educator. I volunteered at a science museum for a few years, over a decade ago, but I've been a computer programmer since. I felt more confident answering the original question since I can talk about my own experiences with autism - but what I know of blindness comes only from people I led through activities at the St. Louis Science Center.)
@jessmahler @lila (What I learned from that can be summarized, though: anybody can learn anything if they can be led to connect it to a familiar concept. Nobody can make that connection for them, but children will tell you constantly where their knowledge ends and give hints about how they form connections and interact intellectually with the world. What bridges the gap from there to what we wish to teach, and how can I make the points of connection most obvious?)
@Kistaro That is an outcome I could be 100% okay with.