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The purpose of this paper is to investigate why children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) tend to respond to tasks from their own perspective. The authors investigated the effects of explicitness of viewpoint on performance of spontaneous level 2 perspective-taking skills in six- to eight-year-old children with ASD.

The authors conducted visual perspective-taking tasks with explicit and implicit instructions about the viewpoint to be used. Participants operated a toy car on a map while listening to the experimenter’s instructions. In the implicit condition, when the experimenter said “Turn right/left” at each intersection, the participants moved the car accordingly. Subsequently, in the explicit condition, the experimenter said “Look from the driver’s viewpoint and turn right/left” at each intersection.

In the implicit condition, the authors did not observe a clear developmental change in performance between six- and eight-year-old children in the ASD group. In contrast, performance in the ASD group improved under the explicit condition relative to that under the implicit condition.

The results suggest six- to eight-year-old children with ASD tend not to spontaneously use level 2 perspective-taking skills. Therefore, viewpoints should be explicitly instructed to children with ASD. In addition, it is also important to implement training to encourage spontaneous transitions from self-perspective to other-perspective under the implicit condition.

In this study, a mode choice model explicitly considering travel time reliability is developed. This model quantifies travelers' attitudes towards travel time variability as well as average travel time. Data were collected from the morning commuters who have two or three alternative modes including some public transportation and private vehicles. The survey period includes both a normal period where all the transportation modes were available and an abnormal period where the main major public transportation service was closed. The model is applied to practical commuters' decision making, and one of the findings in the mode choice model is that they pay relatively large attention to the travel time variability. In this model, travel time variability is dealt with as the possibilities that the commuters arrive before or after their job starting time separately. The best-fit model indicates that the commuters pay more attention to early arrival and less to late arrival in the normal period. In the abnormal period, however, their attention shifts drastically to late arrival. This suggests that the commuters behave optimistically in the normal period and pessimistically in the abnormal period.