Effects of a Robot-Enhanced Intervention for Children With ASD on Teaching Turn-Taking Skills

Among social skills that are core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder, turn-taking plays a fundamental role in regulating social interaction and communication. Our main focus in this study is to investigate the effectiveness of a robot-enhanced intervention on turn-taking abilities. We aim to ident...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of educational computing research Vol. 58; no. 1; pp. 29 - 62
Main Authors David, Daniel O., Costescu, Cristina A., Matu, Silviu, Szentagotai, Aurora, Dobrean, Anca
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.03.2020
Subjects
Autism
Behavior Modification
Emotional Response
Foreign Countries
Interpersonal Competence
Intervention
Pervasive Developmental Disorders
Program Effectiveness
Robotics
Skill Development
Social Development
Verbal Communication
Young Children
Romania
social robot
assistive technology
turn-taking
autism spectrum disorder
social skills
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ISSN0735-6331
1541-4140
DOI10.1177/0735633119830344

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Summary:Among social skills that are core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder, turn-taking plays a fundamental role in regulating social interaction and communication. Our main focus in this study is to investigate the effectiveness of a robot-enhanced intervention on turn-taking abilities. We aim to identify to what degree social robots can improve turn-taking skills and whether this type of intervention provides similar or better gains than standard intervention. This study presents a series of 5 single-subject experiments with children with autism spectrum disorder aged between 3 and 5 years. Each child receives 20 intervention sessions (8 robot-enhanced sessions—robot-enhanced treatment (RET), 8 standard human sessions—standard human treatment, and 4 sessions with the intervention that was more efficient). Our findings show that most children reach similar levels of performance on turn-taking skills across standard human treatment and RET, meaning that children benefit to a similar extent from both interventions. However, in the RET condition, children seemed to see their robotic partner as being more interesting than their human partner, due to the fact that they looked more at the robotic partner compared with the human partner.
ISSN:0735-6331
1541-4140
DOI:10.1177/0735633119830344