Attentional Behavior of Children With ASD in Response to Robotic Agents

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affects a variety of social skills in children. One of the most important social skills that are affected by ASD is the ability to pay attention; ASD introduces unnecessary temporal delays in the attentional behavior of children toward external stimuli. This research focuses on identifying the effect of different social stimuli from robotic agents to assess the attentional behavior of children with ASD. Latencies in shifting attention and the number of attentions paid to a stimulus are defined as indexes of attentional behaviors for children with ASD. Nine children with ASD (seven males and two females, mean: 7.57 ± 2.57 years) that had minimal to no symptoms of autism participated in this study. Two robotic agents presented visual, speech, and motion social stimuli to the participants. Regarding social stimuli, a significant effect on the latency in shifting attention (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\chi ^{2}(2)=9.55$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text {p} = 0.008$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) and the number of attentions paid (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\chi ^{2}(2)=9.56$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, p = 0.008) was observed in children with ASD. The speech stimulus captured the children’s attention faster than the visual and motion stimuli in terms of latency in shifting attention and the number of attentions paid. Moreover, significant positive correlations were found for some pairs of stimuli among visual, speech, and motion stimuli for latencies in shifting attention, as well as the number of attentions paid using Pearson’s correlation analysis. This study contributes to the literature in terms of the impact of robotic stimuli on the attentional behavior of children with ASD.