Reduced Mimicry to Virtual Reality Avatars in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Mimicry involves unconsciously copying the actions of others. Increasing evidence suggests that autistic people can copy the goal of an observed action but show differences in their mimicry. We investigated mimicry in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) within a two-dimensional virtual reality environment. Participants played an imitation game with a socially engaged avatar and socially disengaged avatar. Despite being told only to copy the goal of the observed action, autistic participants and matched neurotypical participants mimicked the kinematics of the avatars’ movements. However, autistic participants mimicked less. Social engagement did not modulate mimicry in either group. The results demonstrate the feasibility of using virtual reality to induce mimicry and suggest mimicry differences in ASD may also occur when interacting with avatars.

Why and how to use virtual reality to study human social interaction: The challenges of exploring a new research landscape

“…The choice of which virtual character for advice and whether they followed the advice (i.e., which door they then chose to go through) provided an implicit measure of trust (Hale et al ., 2017). Other studies recorded participants’ hand position during their interaction with a virtual character as a measurement of imitation and found that typical adults automatically imitated the virtual characters, but participants with autism spectrum conditions imitated less (Forbes et al ., 2016; Pan & Hamilton, 2015). These studies illustrate the use of VR to record implicit social behaviours which may be more revealing than traditional key‐hit measures.…”

“…Second, capturing participant motion means the VR environment can be programmed to be responsive in real time, with both embodiment (see below) and realistic interactions between the participant and other objects or characters. For instance, knowing the participant's head location means that a virtual character can be programmed to orient their head and/or gaze towards participant's head (Forbes, Pan, & Hamilton, 2016;Pan & Hamilton, 2015) and to maintain an appropriate social distance by stepping back or forward (Pan, Gillies, Barker, Clark, & Slater, 2012). The ability to link the behaviour of a virtual character to the participant in real time also facilitated a series of studies on mimicry in VR, where the virtual character copies participants' head movements (Bailenson & Yee, 2007;Verberne, Ham, Ponnada, & Midden, 2013), or both head and torso movements (Hale & Hamilton, 2016).…”

“…Finally, motion capture allows the researcher to record natural and unconstrained behaviours. This permits measures such as proxemics , approach as a measure of trust (Hale, Payne, Taylor, Paoletti, & Hamilton, 2017), and imitation (Forbes et al, 2016;Pan & Hamilton, 2015). For instance, McCall & Singer conducted a study where participants in an HMD explored a virtual art gallery while two other VCs (representing people the participant believed to be fair or unfair) remained in fixed locations.…”

Technology-Facilitated Diagnosis and Treatment of Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Engineering Perspective

“…Some studies did use such virtual reality systems/devices [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. However, many studies used conventional computer monitors to display virtual reality scenes with one or more avatars [37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]. Hence, there is certain degree of overlap between the virtual reality based presentation mode and the conventional computer based presentation mode.…”

“…Due to the 360-degree virtual environment, a participant would have to turn his/her head up to 60 degrees left or right to see all avatars in the scene. Vizard is also used in [44,58] to create virtual reality scenes.…”