Ordered interpersonal synchronisation in ASD children via robots

Abstract

Children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) experience persistent disrupted coordination in interpersonal synchronisation that is thought to be associated with deficits in neural connectivity. Robotic interventions have been explored for use with ASD children worldwide revealing that robots encourage one-to-one social and emotional interactions. However, associations between interpersonal synchronisation and emotional empathy have not yet been directly explored in French and Japanese ASD children when they interact with a human or a robot under analogous experimental conditions. Using the paradigm of actor-perceiver, where the child was the actor and the robot or the human the perceiver, we recorded the autonomic heart rate activation and reported emotional feelings of ASD children in both countries. Japanese and French ASD children showed different interpersonal synchronisation when they interacted with the human perceiver, even though the human was the same in both countries. However, they exhibited similar interpersonal synchronisation when the perceiver was the robot. The findings suggest that the mechanism combining interpersonal synchronisation and emotional empathy might be weakened but not absent in ASD children and that both French and Japanese ASD children do spontaneously and unconsciously discern non verbal actions of non human partners through a direct matching process that occurs via automatic mapping.

Influence of agent’s self-disclosure on human empathy

“…By empathizing, humans act positively toward agents and are more likely to accept them. Various studies have been done on linguistic information [ 8 – 10 ], nonverbal information [ 11 – 13 ], situations [ 14 – 16 ], and relationships [ 17 – 19 ] as factors that cause empathy.…”

People with Autism Spectrum Disorder Could Interact More Easily with a Robot than with a Human: Reasons and Limits

“…Children with ASD show a more pronounced physiological response (increased heart rate) when interacting with a robot than with a human [99]. It therefore seems appropriate to test directly whether autistic people prefer to interact with a robot rather than a human.…”

Application of robotic technology in intervention treatment of autism

“…During the baseline period, the participants participated in the human therapist teaching and knew the level of the participants' co-attention during the baseline period, the Nao robot participates in the teaching activity, carries on the target behavior intervention training, after the maintenance period, does not have the robot, understands the participant to the common attention skill, grasps the situation. The dependent variables was eye gazing，the evaluation criteria were as follows: eye gaze time, percentage of eye gaze follow skill, percentage of finger indication follow skill [5][6][7][8][9][10][11] . According to the data of intervention period and maintenance period, with the increase of intervention period, the target skill was gradually mastered, and the target skill did not disappear immediately after removing the Nao robot, the utility model has a certain maintenance effect.…”