Facial Automaton for Conveying Emotions as a Social Rehabilitation Tool for People with Autism

The terms Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and pervasive developmental disorders refer to a wide continuum of associated cognitive and neuro-behavioral disorders, including, but not limited to, three core-defining features: impairments in socialization , impairments in verbal and nonverbal communication, and restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviors. Although autism was first described over 50 years ago, our improved understanding of this complex disorder has emerged over the past two decades. Despite recent intense focus on autism, its study continues to be an art and science in fast evolution. There is marked variability in the severity of symptomatology across patients, and level of intellectual function can range from profound mental retardation through the superior range on conventional IQ tests. In ASD we can find: marked impairment in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors, such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body posture, and gestures to regulate social interaction. The communication impairments seen in the autistic spectrum are far more complex than presumed by simple speech delay and share some similarities with the deficits seen in children with developmental language disorders or specific language impairments. Young autistic children, even if verbal, almost universally have comprehension deficits, in particular deficits in understanding higher order complex questions. Deficits in pragmatics, the use of language to communicate effectively, are almost universally present too. Another core characteristic of ASD is the presence of stereotyped behaviors and circumscribed/unusual interests, which encompass qualitative deficits in several aspects of behavior. It is moreover well documented that individuals with autism have impairments in processing of social and emotional information, as evident in tasks assessing face and emotion recognition, imitation of body movements, interpretation and use of gestures and theory of mind [Baron-Cohen 1994, Davies 1994, Dawson 1998, Smith 1994]. Typically developing infants show preferential attention to social rather than inanimate stimuli; in contrast, individuals with autism seem to lack these early social predispositions [Spelke 1995, Maestro 2002]. This hypothesis was recently substantiated in a neurofunctional study [Schultz 2000] of face perception in autism, in which adequate task performance was accompanied by abnormal ventral temporal cortical activities, which in turn suggested that participants had treated faces as objects. Klin et al. [Klin 2002] created an experimental paradigm to measure social functioning in natural situations, in which they used eye-tracking technology to measure visual fixations of cognitively able