Animating Characters and Experiencing Others: A Look at Peer Groups' Storyboard Narratives

Background: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are thought to be impaired in narrative abilities, especially those related to perspective taking (Colle, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, & van der Lely, 2008). The most prominent account for these difficulties is that individuals with ASD lack a Theory of Mind (e.g., Baron-Cohen, 1995). However, more recent ‘enactive’ approaches situate an understanding of others as an embodied interactional practice, rather than as an abstract process of mind-reading (De Jaegher, 2013; Gallagher & Hutto, 2008).

Objectives: This study combined enactive theoretical accounts of perspective taking with Discourse Analysis in order to examine the construction of fictional narratives (‘storyboards’) within small adolescent social groups, where at least one member of the group was diagnosed with ASD.

Methods: . The data corpus was comprised of 7 hours of video recordings, which featured 9 adolescents with ASD and 19 neurotypical peers, divided into groups of 4-6 adolescents. The data was collected during a team building workshop at a summer camp. Social groups were given a set of photographs of previous workshop or camp activities, which depicted group members, campers, camp administrators, and others at camp. They were instructed to create a storyboard using at least 10 photos. Videos were transcribed using conversation analysis conventions (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984). Transcripts were coded for instances where the perspective of the developing characters, author, narrator, or audience was made relevant. Fine-grained analyses of extended stretches of talk were then conducted in order to determine the ways in which story characters and the larger narrative were constructed through discourse.

Results: Two major findings emerged that reflected participants’ perspective taking abilities. First, participants indirectly referenced story character’s mental lives by offering contextualized descriptions of characters’ actions. There was variation in the extent to which action descriptions linked to mental states; action descriptions could entail, imply, or index character mental states (see Table 1 for transcript extracts and descriptions). Second, participants relied on the enactment of genre conventions when constructing their narratives as a means to meet the expectations of the presumed audience. This strategy allowed participants to circumvent anticipating or ‘mentalizing’ about the expectations of a particular audience, and instead apply generic fidelity criteria that would presumably be recognized by a broad, hypothetical audience. Participants’’ drew upon genre conventions related to plot structure, character identities (e.g., villains and heroes), and the physical layout of the storyboard. In keeping with previous discourse analytic work in ASD, this reflected ‘socio-cultural’ perspective taking (Ochs et al., 2002).

Conclusions: This study illustrates two ways that adolescents with ASD engaged in perspective taking when constructing fictional narratives with peers: describing character actions and enacting genre conventions. These findings suggest that narrower approaches to identifying perspective taking abilities in individuals with ASD, especially those that restrict analysis to the word level (e.g., tallying the number of mental state terms used in a narrative retelling) may not capture the full range of narrative or perspective taking abilities in which individuals with ASD can engage.