What Is Mindblindness?

Alonso is a fourth grade student at South Side Elementary School. He is bilingual in Spanish and English and is strong in math, following routines, organization, and politeness. He struggles with problem solving, understanding others’ feelings and gets easily distracted. Alonso has high-functioning autism. Alonso is in an inclusion classroom with children of the same age for 85 percent of the day, though he goes to the learning support teacher to receive help on academics if he needs it and also meets with a social skills group. Though Alonso has high-functioning autism, he still performs well in the classroom and receives mostly A’s and B’s. Alonso thinks literally, and has trouble understanding figurative language, with standing up for himself,

They have issues with an idea called mindblindness. Mindblindness is when a child does not realize that other people have feelings that are different from their feelings. Children demonstrate their mindblindness when they are in conversation with another child. The high functioning autism child may talk extensively on the object that they perseverate on and might not understand the social cues from others, such as eye rolling or an annoyed look. The child does not talk about the topic intentionally; they speak about the topic without realizing it and have to be told when others no longer want to listen. Sansosti et al., explain it better: “individuals with HFA/AS have a poor capacity to recognize, relate to, and understand the feelings of others, making it difficult for them to understand why others do not share their same level of passion.” (Sansosti et al., 2010, p. 16). These children want to be friends with others, but their social skills, and their capabilities of understanding others prohibit them from making lifelong friends. Because students want to make friends but have a hard time doing so, social skills groups will benefit that child