Perception of Social Affordances by Children With Mild Handicapping Conditions: Implications for Social Skills Research and Training

Children with mild handicapping conditions are at high risk for social isolation, a fact often attributed to their poor social skills and, occasionally, to their poor social perceptual skill. Past research, in the absence of a clear theoretical orientation to the role of perception in social competence, has yielded equivocal support for the perceptual-skill deficit hypothesis. This study, following an ecological approach to social perception, was designed to answer three questions: (a) Do children with mild handicapping conditions have different levels of skill in perceiving a social intention than those of nonhandicapped children? (b) Are the ratings of handicapped children's intention to play different from those for nonhandicapped children? (c) Do ratings of intention to play vary with the classification of the child's partner? To test these ideas, children (handicapped vs. nonhandicapped) viewed video clips of an encounter between two children (both handicapped, one handicapped and one nonhandicapped, or both nonhandicapped) from the point of view of one of these children, either sitting at a table or entering the room. Results showed that children, regardless of classification, displayed similar ratings of the videotaped children's intentions to play. Children without handicaps were rated as not intending to interact socially when their partner had a mild handicapping condition; children with handicaps, on the other hand, were typically rated as intending to interact socially with both the nonhandicapped and handicapped children. These data (a) indicate a need to describe explicitly the structure in social encounters which directly specifies social intent and (b) suggest the value of examining the actions and perceptual functioning of highly socially skilled children who have mild handicapping conditions.