Extending the BDI model to accelerate the mental development of autistic patients

It was discovered about a decade ago that autistic people cannot properly understand mental states. We extend the psychological observations and the "theory of mind" model by a more precise description of how reasoning about mental states and actions are corrupted under autism. Logical artificial intelligence and, in particular, reasoning about beliefs, desires and intentions (BDI), serves as a basis to construct a set of scenarios that were consistently misunderstood by the autistic children in our experimental study. We built a set of exercises, teaching autistic patients to reason properly about. mental states in accordance with the traditions of the axiomatic method, since the natural methods of teaching (by example) usually do not help. A suggested autistic training strategy is discussed from the viewpoint of an autonomous mental development approach.