In addition to social and behavioral deficits, individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often struggle to develop the adaptive skills necessary to achieve independence. Driving intervention in individuals with ASD is a growing area of study, but it is still widely under-researched. We present the development and preliminary assessment of a gaze-contingent adaptive virtual reality driving simulator that uses real-time gaze information to adapt the driving environment with the aim of providing a more individualized method of driving intervention. We conducted a small pilot study of 20 adolescents with ASD using our system: 10 with the adaptive gaze-contingent version of the system and 10 in a purely performance-based version. Preliminary results suggest that the novel intervention system may be beneficial in teaching driving skills to individuals with ASD.

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Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is an extremely common and costly neurodevelopmental disorder. While significant research has been devoted to addressing social communication skill deficits of people with ASD, relatively less attention has been paid to improving their deficits in daily activities such as driving. Only two empirical studies have investigated driving performance in individuals with ASD-both employing proprietary driving simulation software. We designed a novel Virtual Reality (VR) driving simulator so that we could integrate various sensory modules directly into our system as well as to define task-oriented protocols that would not be otherwise possible using commercial software. We conducted a small user study with a group of individuals with ASD and a group of typically developing community controls. We found that our system was capable of distinguishing behavioral patterns between both groups indicating that it is suitable for use in designing a protocol aimed at improving driving performance.

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