Another area of particular difficulty is character perspective. When we’re understanding character perspective we have to be able to say, “Here’s this pretend character Polly, and she’s been raised by her grandmother, and she knows a lot about sewing and she knows a lot about playing with dolls, and here’s this other character Dick who, you know, knows a lot about playing soccer.” There’s not much in between there.
Both of their approaches to this problem are very different. One of the things I do, again, is to use thought bubbles to show the difference between what someone is thinking and what someone isn’t thinking. For instance, if you play 20 Questions with a child with autism, typically if they have a bag of things and they’re supposed to give you hints, you’ll say, “Is it yellow?” And they’ll go, “Yes! It’s a comb.” Right? It’s very difficult for them to keep a secret where your mind knows it doesn’t know it and my mind does. So we spend a lot of time in those areas so they can understand just the pure fact that your mind might know something that my mind doesn’t.