Belgium-based psychologist Peter Vermeulen first coined the term ‘context blindness’ in his first book on autism (Autistic Thinking ) in 1996. By ‘context blindness’, Vermeulen refers to the ‘absolute thinking’ characteristic in Autistics…
…For example, a young man with an [Autism Spectrum Disorder] was taken to see an apartment into which he would soon be moving. The current tenant’s furniture and belongings were in the apartment when he viewed it. After taking a tour he responded that he could not live there. While this might easily be interpreted as resistance to change or a difficulty with transitions, after some probing it was discovered that it was the result of him misreading the context. He thought that he would have to live with someone else’s possessions and that there would be no room for his furniture and personal items…
Vermeulen believes that treatment of Autism is still too focused on behavior and minimally focused on observation or determining the way of thinking that leads to the behaviour. Scripts and rules are insufficient to overcome social misunderstanding and social faux pas in Autism Spectrum Disorders, context must be added to materials taught…
…Emotion recognition training is immensely popular in the field of autism. Typical materials used in this training are photographs or pictures of facial expressions of emotions. When we try to figure out what a person feels, we look at context as much as we do facial expression: the situation, what that person says, body language, our past experiences with similar situations, etc. In fact we don’t even need a facial expression to recognize emotions. Even without a facial expression you certainly know how the man in the photo at feels, based on the context. Studies on how people process facial expressions have shown that when we look at faces, our brains always spontaneously encode the context and that in certain instances, context plays an even bigger role in emotion recognition than the facial expression.The second problem with traditional emotion recognition training is the underlying assumption that there is a direct relationship between an emotion and its facial expression. This assumption goes back to Darwin’s idea of universal expression of emotions in which each emotion has its own distinct facial expression. Unfortunately for people with autism, facial expressions are not that straightforward and quite often are ambiguous. Take tears for instance. What do people feel when they have tears on their cheeks? It could mean sadness. But it could also mean happiness or pride. Or it could be an allergic reaction or the result of dicing an onion. How can a brain tell the difference? It uses context.Social competence is not about knowing whether a certain behavior is socially appropriate or not, it is the knowledge of when that behavior is appropriate and when it is not …
(sources: Context Blindness - Geneva Centre for Autism ; Teach Contextual Sensitivity to Children on the Spectrum )