Understanding How Adolescents with Autism Respond to Facial Expressions in Virtual Reality Environments

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are characterized by atypical patterns of behaviors and impairments in social communication. Among the fundamental social impairments in the ASD population are challenges in appropriately recognizing and responding to facial expressions. Traditional intervention approaches often require intensive support and well-trained therapists to address core deficits, with many with ASD having tremendous difficulty accessing such care due to lack of available trained therapists as well as intervention costs. As a result, emerging technology such as virtual reality (VR) has the potential to offer useful technology-enabled intervention systems. In this paper, an innovative VR-based facial emotional expression presentation system was developed that allows monitoring of eye gaze and physiological signals related to emotion identification to explore new efficient therapeutic paradigms. A usability study of this new system involving ten adolescents with ASD and ten typically developing adolescents as a control group was performed. The eye tracking and physiological data were analyzed to determine intragroup and intergroup variations of gaze and physiological patterns. Performance data, eye tracking indices and physiological features indicated that there were differences in the way adolescents with ASD process and recognize emotional faces compared to their typically developing peers. These results will be used in the future for an online adaptive VR-based multimodal social interaction system to improve emotion recognition abilities of individuals with ASD.

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

“…In addition to eye gaze, we have seen studies that employ various methods to obtain user feedback for adaptive control of a treatment/education program, including facial expression, head orientation, human gesture tracking, and physiological data collection [135,136,141,143,146,151].…”

The Role of Sketching States in the Stimulation of Idea Generation: An Eye Movement Study

“…The resolution of the computer screen was 1920 Â 1080 pixels at a refresh rate of 60 Hz. Eye movements were sampled at 120 Hz using the Tobii (Stockholm, Sweden) X120 eye tracker, which was widely used in eye movement studies (Bekele et al, 2013;Chen, Clarke, MacLeod, & Guastella, 2012). The design task was ''facilities that enhance communication in a park''.…”

Usability issues with 3D user interfaces for adolescents with high functioning autism

“…Although it is difficult to find basic 3DUI studies on atomic interactions (e.g., translation, rotation) conducted with the ASD population, there are several related studies such as [4] using a Virtual Reality (VR) Environment to help or study ASD populations with respect to specific high level tasks. For example, Josman et al [16] suggest VR may be used for safely teaching children with ASD street-crossing skills due to its fidelity to real life simulations.…”

“…For example, Josman et al [16] suggest VR may be used for safely teaching children with ASD street-crossing skills due to its fidelity to real life simulations. These works employed VR mostly due to their ability to simulate real world scenarios in a carefully controlled and safe environment, as well as controlled stimuli presentation, objectivity and consistency, and gaming factors to motivate for task completion [4]. Most of these systems employed 3D user interfaces.…”