Abstract
Perspective-taking skills are crucial for successful social interactions and some autistic individuals seem to demonstrate great difficulty in this area. The concept continues to generate clinical and research interest across mainstream psychology and within behavior analysis. Within behavior analysis, relational frame theorists have argued that deictic relational responding is critically involved in perspective-taking. We conducted a systematic search of the behavior analytic studies on deictic relational responding and perspective-taking in autistic individuals to highlight methods used to test perspective-taking and deictic relations, methods to train these if deficits were observed, and evidence for a relationship between deictic relational responding and perspective-taking. Seven studies met inclusion criteria and we conducted a descriptive analysis of these studies. We found some variation in the methods used to test and train perspective-taking through deictic relations. Only three of the studies attempted to demonstrate a link between deictic relational responding and perspective-taking. Overall, our review highlighted a need for more research into deictic relational responding and perspective-taking in autistic individuals, and we discussed specific areas for future research.
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The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
The Sally-Anne task is a classic cognitive development test used to evaluate the theory of mind in children. In this task, a child is presented with a story involving two characters, Sally and Anne, and a physical object, such as a ball. The child is then asked a series of questions about the story, including where Sally will look for the ball when she returns to the room. The correct answer requires the child to understand that Sally does not know that Anne has moved the ball to a new location while she was absent, and therefore will look for it in its original location. The Sally-Anne task is often used to assess the development of a child's ability to understand that others can have beliefs, desires, and intentions that differ from one’s own.
Two studies (Gomez-Becerra et al., 2007; Rehfeldt et al., 2007) also included some participants who either had Down’s Syndrome or were neurotypical. We did not include these participants in our analysis because our aim was to evaluate the impact of deictic relational training on autistic individuals.
The reader should note that Then–Later is not considered to be a core deictic relation because it does not necessarily involve a specific perspective (from I–Here–Now); that is, both Here and Now, in the deictic frame, help to define the perspective of a specific I (i.e., the deictic I). Of course, it is possible, and even likely, that Then and Later may be responded to from a specific perspective (e.g., “I will do x then and y later”), but critically a particular perspective is not necessarily involved in a Then–Later relation because no I, Here, or Now is specified.
The Theory of Mind Inventory (ToMI) is a standardized questionnaire designed to assess an individual’s understanding and awareness of mental states, such as beliefs, desires, intentions and emotions, in themselves and others. The ToMI provides researchers and clinicians with a quantitative measure of an individual’s theory of mind abilities. It consists of a series of scenarios and questions that prompt participants to infer and explain the mental states of story characters. The ToMI has been widely used in developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical settings to study various aspects of theory of mind in both children and adults.
This approach is consistent with Barnes-Holmes et al. (2017), who argued that the term deictic, as used within RFT, refers “to verbal relations that specify an individual as located in a particular space (e.g., “here” rather than “there”) and at a particular time (e.g., “now” rather than “then”)” (p. 161). As an aside, the perceptual experience of being located in a particular space and time is, of course, not arbitrarily applicable, as is the case with all other perceptual experiences (e.g., simply experiencing the color red is not a verbal event in RFT). The arbitrary applicability is found in the relational responding that occurs when humans learn to communicate with each other about their perceptual experiences by relating them to arbitrary sounds and other symbols (i.e., having a perspective, or seeing the color red, is not arbitrary, but relating these perceptual events to “I”, “me”, “mine” etc., or “red,” “scarlet,” “crimson,” etc. is arbitrarily applicable, in that there is no formal relationship, for example, between the word “I” and my ongoing continuous perceptual experience of the world).
Developing a “standard” experimental model of deictic relational responding using a matching-to-sample (MTS) type-preparation would likely be very challenging (but see Guinther, 2017, 2018, for possible examples with adult participants). However, it is important to emphasize that RFT is a theoretical account of human language and cognition, which includes explaining how language is actually used in the natural environment. In developing this account, it is not a requirement that all conceptual analyses must yield to a formal MTS-type experimental model. Indeed, it may be that focusing excessively on MTS preparations will serve to narrow and distort RFT as a "grand theory” of human language and cognition.
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Appendix 1
Appendix 1
The three deictic relations (I–YOU, HERE–THERE, and NOW–THEN) have been referred to as both individual relations and as frames in the RFT literature, including in the seminal volume on RFT (Hayes et al., 2001). However, it seems more precise to define the individual elements as relations, but combinations thereof as frames (see Kavanagh et al., 2020; Barnes-Holmes & Harte, 2022). This is because the concept of the frame typically refers to a minimal relational network that is required to distinguish a particular class or pattern of AARRing. None of the three individual relations, however, appear to denote a network of relations (i.e., a frame); in each case only two elements are specified. Each of the relations may involve some form of mutual entailment (see below), but a network of relations is not possible without combining it with other relations. In the case of deictic AARRing, it is only when the I–YOU relation is combined with one or both of the other relations that at least some of the deictic properties of AARRing may be clearly specified. For this reason, it seems wise to reserve the term “frame” for patterns of AARRing that involve combining the I–YOU deictic relation with at least one of the other deictic relations.Footnote 5
Before continuing, it seems important to note that the three deictic relations may each be considered mutually entailed based on how they are employed in natural language interactions. With respect to I–YOU, for example, if individual A asks individual B “How are you?”, individual B does not respond “You are fine.” Rather, they respond “I am fine.” In this sense, a question about “YOU” entails responding with “I” (i.e., “YOU” is transformed into “I” when the listener responds as a speaker). A similar issue of entailed transformation applies to the HERE–THERE relation in that when individual A is at location X, X is HERE and Y is THERE; but when the individual moves to Y, Y is HERE and X is THERE. In effect, HERE entails THERE and THERE entails HERE as defined by an individual’s spatial location (i.e., “THERE” is transformed into “HERE" and “HERE” is transformed into “THERE”). Finally, a similar analysis applies to NOW–THEN in that when individual A is at time 1, this is NOW; but when they are at time 2, this is NOW and time 1 is THEN. As such, NOW entails THEN and THEN entails NOW as defined by an individual’s temporal location (i.e., “NOW” is transformed into “THEN" and “THEN” is transformed into “NOW”).
As noted above, deictic framing may be defined as responding in accordance with I-YOU and one or both of the three mutually entailed deictic relations. For example, if individual A asks individual B “Are you there?” individual B may reply, “Yes, I am here.” These two statements are relationally coherent within the context of deictic framing because, as noted above, in such a verbal interaction “you” entails “I” and “there” entails “here” Likewise, imagine individual A asks individual B, “If you finish the job by then, let me know”; if individual B does complete the job by the specified time (then), they may respond at that point with “I just finished the job now.” In this verbal interaction, “you” again entails “I” and “then” entails “now.” These examples serve to illustrate how the I–YOU deictic relation may be combined with HERE–THERE and NOW–THEN relations to form a pattern of relational responding that may be usefully defined as a deictic relational frame or network. In general terms, therefore, deictic framing involves an individual locating (or framing) themselves verbally in time and/or space relative to other individuals (e.g., I am in Belfast at 5pm and Joao is in Bauru at 2pm). In this sense, the deictic frame thus involves relating relations (see Kavanagh et al., 2020; Barnes-Holmes & Harte, 2022), which renders the deictic frame somewhat more complex than other frequently discussed nondeictic frames.Footnote 6
Similar issues pertaining to the “fuzzy” nature of some of the concepts in RFT have been noted in relatively recent developments in RFT. For example, in proposing the multidimensional multilevel (MDML) framework, Barnes-Holmes et al. (2017) noted that “there are many examples of AARRing that do not fit neatly into a specific level of relational development” (p. 441; the levels were defined as mutual entailing, relational framing, relational networking, relating relations, and relating relational networks). The general point being, that as RFT continues to grapple with the complexity of human language and cognition, some of the established concepts and categories may need to be seen as relatively fuzzy, and in some cases adjusted or refined, or even abandoned, in the service of increasing behavioral prediction-and-influence with precision, scope and depth (see Sivaraman et al. (2023), who defined listener naming as mutual entailing but speaker naming as relational framing, thus arguing for a change in the early RFT view of naming as simply mutual entailment).
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Hempkin, N., Sivaraman, M. & Barnes-Holmes, D. Deictic Relational Responding and Perspective-Taking in Autistic Individuals: A Scoping Review. Perspect Behav Sci 47, 107–137 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-024-00397-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-024-00397-2