Human-robot interaction in autism

FACE AND AUTISM Autism is a developmental disorder characterized by qualitative impairments in social interaction and communication and a restricted range of activities and interests. It is in fact well documented that individuals with autism have impairments in processing social and emotional information [1]. This is particularly evident in tasks assessing face and emotion recognition, imitation of body movements, interpretation and use of gestures and theory of mind. Typically developing infants show preferential attention to social rather than inanimate stimuli; in contrast, individuals with autism seem to lack this early social predisposition. This hypothesis was recently substantiated in a neurofunctional study of facial 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. [2] 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 individuals with autism. When viewing naturalistic social situations, people with autism demonstrate abnormal patterns of visual pursuit, consistent with reduced salience of eyes, and increased salience of mouth, bodies, and objects. In addition, individuals with autism use atypical strategies when performing such tasks, relying on individual pieces of the face rather than on the overall configuration. Alongside these perceptual anomalies, individuals with autism have deficits in conceiving other people's mental states. According to the cognitive theory of mindblindness, this impairment is related to the difficulty that people with autism have in conceiving of people as mental agents. Mindblindness is, thus, the inability to perceive another person's mental state. Recent studies have shown that individuals, particularly those with high functioning autism, can learn to cope with common social situations if they are made to enact possible scenarios they may encounter. By recalling appropriate modes of behavior and expressions in specific situations, they are able to react appropriately. There are now a number of highly structured therapeutic approaches based on emotion recognition and social skill training using photographs, drawings, videos, or DVD-ROMs (e.g. Mind Reading, produced by Human Emotions, U.K.). Their aim is to enable individuals with autism to interpret meanings and intentions of people and to anticipate their emotional reactions to typical situations they may encounter during the course of their daily lives. These methods show that basic emotion understanding can be taught; however, since the learning process derived from these …