Zooming In & Zooming Out

If we are playing cars with a friend, it is not hard to take in what our friend is doing with cars three feet away... even if we had been entirely focused on the cool looking hubcaps on the car in his hand just a moment before. We can shift our attention into a planning mode and suggest that it might be fun to race our cars down the hall way together. Even if we imagined the race would start by the door to the kitchen, we quickly agree that it can start at the other end of the hall by the bathroom when our friend suggests this would be better. We can agree because we can imagine the race either way and don’t see that it makes any difference which way we go.

We can wait for our friend to get beside us in the hall way and coordinate when we will start our race. We are careful to follow the starting rules that we set up together because we can imagine our friend being angry if we “jump the gun” on the race and start out first.

After the race, we can take in our friend’s disappointment at losing the race even as we gleefully enjoy having won it. We can behave with good sportsmanship because we remember that we want to play with this friend again tomorrow.

The ability to move in to focus on some small aspect of a situation and then out to the larger picture almost effortlessly is called “set shifting”

Kids with ASD have trouble with this kind of rapid set shifting. It is like the distance function on the camera of the mind gets stuck at a single distance and can't move in or out.

The young child with ASD might be able to shift from looking at the wheel of the car to looking at the door of the car. But zooming attention out to look at the car as a whole is very hard once attention has been focused narrowly on the wheel.

This is one reason why drill type learning can be quite effective with children who have ASD. All the items in the drill are at a similar "set". For example, "What color is this car?" "Red" What color is this train?" "Green" "What color is this banana?" "Yellow".

The down side of drill is that even after successfully learning to answer questions in a one set drill format, the child never spontaneously describes the car as red or the train as green or the banana as yellow because answering color questions is one set, but talking about what you see in terms of color is another set entirely. So the learning is fragmented and often not functional.

In an older child with ASD, the problem with set shifting may make it hard for the child to move from a section in a math assignment where adding is required to a section in the assignment where subtracting is required — even though adding and subtracting are equally easy for the child to do.

In a high school aged child, the problem may be in trying to understand conversations that veer unexpectedly from wide topic to narrow topic.

In other words: This difficulty with set shifting is a very persistent issue and is worth the effort to understand.

Many of the strategies that are used to help children with ASD regardless of age are really little tricks that help the child with cognitive set shifting. Or long term strategies aimed at helping the child become a more flexible set shifter.

Now Andy's cognitive set includes both me as a play partner and more toys than just the duck. I have helped him shift his focus to include many more elements to his play. I have even been able to introduce a pretend play element into the play with the little greeting toys routine. At this point, Andy tells me that he's interested in the game by suddenly sitting up rather than laying down passively letting me slip toys in and out of his hand. He is clearly more ready to be engaged in play with me now that he understands what we are doing.

After Andy sat up, I brought out the doorway part of the toy and then and we started playing a game that went like this:

1. I set a wooden boy on one side of the door and knock

2. Andy opens the door.

3. I say Hi Boy and send the boy through the door. Andy looks at the boy and then sends him back through the door.

4. I close the door and say Bye Bye boy

5. Repeat with new wooden piece sent through the door including the girl, mailbox and finally the duck.

We played this game with Andy enjoying it enough to independently send the duck back out the door (giving it up of his own volition).

Now the game was starting to look like pretend play. Could we put the doorway into the wooden base? We did and we started to move the pieces through the door on the track, just as is intended with this toy.

I do not believe that this game ever looked like a park to Andy — but he did learn to use the toy physically as it was intended. The doorway was an element of pretend play that made sense to Andy and he put pieces of the game into my hand to get me to play with them.

Andy was able to shift his understanding of the game from one that was narrow, perceptual and self-directed to one that was much wider, conceptual, and social.

Now, here is the easier way that I might have accomplished all this. I could have simply shown Andy a video clip of the game before I ever showed him the toy and he would have started with the cognitive set that I wanted him to have.

The whole toy would have seemed familiar as soon as he looked at it the first time rather the only familiar item being the duck. He would have known what we were going to do with the toy.

Moral of the Story

Regardless of what strategy you use, the moral of this story is that it is very difficult for a child with autism to shift attention, not just from activity to activity but also from a narrow focus to a wider focus, or from a wider focus to a more narrow focus within an activity. If you can see that this is the problem as you are playing, you will need to find ways to help your child zoom in and out as needed.