Sensorimotor Research Utilising Immersive Virtual Reality: A Pilot Study with Children and Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

When learning and interacting with the world, people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) show compromised use of vision and enhanced reliance on body-based information. As this atypical profile is associated with motor and social difficulties, interventions could aim to reduce the potentially isolating reliance on the body and foster the use of visual information. To this end, head-mounted displays (HMDs) have unique features that enable the design of Immersive Virtual Realities (IVR) for manipulating and training sensorimotor processing. The present study assesses feasibility and offers some early insights from a new paradigm for exploring how children and adults with ASD interact with Reality and IVR when vision and proprioception are manipulated. Seven participants (five adults, two children) performed a self-turn task in two environments (Reality and IVR) for each of three sensory conditions (Only Proprioception, Only Vision, Vision + Proprioception) in a purpose-designed testing room and an HMD-simulated environment. The pilot indicates good feasibility of the paradigm. Preliminary data visualisation suggests the importance of considering inter-individual variability. The participants in this study who performed worse with Only Vision and better with Only Proprioception seemed to benefit from the use of IVR. Those who performed better with Only Vision and worse with Only Proprioception seemed to benefit from Reality. Therefore, we invite researchers and clinicians to consider that IVR may facilitate or impair individuals depending on their profiles.

Perception and Motion in Real and Virtual Environments: A Narrative Review of Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…From this perspective, we could speculate that an enlarged inter-stimuli delay might reduce the “multisensory crowding” associated with enlarged TBWs, resulting in sensory and learning facilitation. Although this has yet to be investigated, our studies suggest that IVR and HMDs disrupt proprioception in neurotypical groups ( Valori et al, 2020b ) and can either improve or worsen sensorimotor performance in individuals with ASD depending on the way they utilize visual and proprioceptive information, which differs across individuals ( Valori et al, 2020a ).…”

“…Participants joined four weekly 30-min desensitization sessions, whereby each stimulus could be delivered a maximum of 20 times and was gradually moved closer to the participant, thus reducing their perceived anxiety and increasing the interaction time towards the target stimuli ( Johnston et al, 2020 ). Despite these preliminary works offering encouraging suggestions, further investigation is needed to elucidate the sensorimotor potential of IVR training, which would be particularly compelling for ASD, and their acceptability to users ( Valori et al, 2020a ).…”

“…Children with ASD appeared to feel comfortable with the same interpersonal distance between them and either a real or virtual character in an HMD-delivered IVR designed to be a faithful reproduction of the real one ( Simões et al, 2020 ). In a recent pilot experiment, we studied how children and adults with ASD move and perceive their own movements with different sensory information available in IVR versus real environments ( Valori et al, 2020a ). Seven participants with ASD were rotated to a certain degree while sitting on a swivel chair, and then asked to actively rotate back to the starting position, thus encoding and reproducing the exact self-motion.…”

Multimedia Interventions for Neurodiversity: Leveraging Insights from Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience to Build an Innovative Practice

“…Our recent study highlights how head-mounted displays change the way children and adults use visual and proprioceptive information to move and locate themselves in space, with a strong reliance on vision in the neurotypical groups [ 15 ]. In addition, we investigated individual differences in how children and adults with ASD move and perceive their movements with different sensory information available [ 44 ]. In our sample, participants with greater motor accuracy when visual landmarks were available performed better in reality.…”

Defining Virtual Reality (VR). Scoping Literature Review on VR Applications in Autism Research

“…Recently, several researchers have investigated the sensory sensitivities associated with autism. Sensory processing is affected in over 90% of autistic children and it refers to the ability to capture and integrate complex information from the senses (Alcaniz- Valori et al (2020). found, using VR, that when learning new movements autistic children are less influenced by visual feedback and prefer proprioceptive feedback.…”