9. How Children with Autism and Machines Learn to Interact

We explore how children with autism (CwA) learn to interact and what kind of difficulties they experience. Autistic reasoning is an adequate means to explore team formation because it is rather simple compared to the reasoning of controls and software systems on one hand, and allows exploration of human behavior in real-world environment on the other hand. We discover that reasoning about mental world, impaired in various degrees in autistic patients, is the key parameter of limiting the capability to form the teams and cooperate. While teams of humans, robots and software agents have a manifold of limitations to form teams, including resources, conflicting desires, uncertainty, environment constraints, children with autism have only a single limitation which is reduced reasoning about the mental world. We correlate the complexity of the expressions for mental states children are capable of operating with their ability to form teams. Reasoning rehabilitation methodology is described, as well as its implications for children behavior in the real world involving interactions and including cooperation and team formation.