Understanding Performance and Verbal-Communication of Children with ASD in a Collaborative Virtual Environment.
Lian Zhang, Zachary Warren, Amy Swanson and 2 others
PMID 29560561WHAT IT FOUND
A 60-minute collaborative virtual puzzle session was feasible for children with and without autism: all completed it and reported high enjoyment.
Some performance and communication measures improved pre-to-post. The authors did not test it as treatment.
Key findings
01The system was feasible and well tolerated: all participants completed the session, with zero dropouts, and the software and hardware worked as designed.
02Participants reported high enjoyment and perceived improvement in talking with partners.
03The system indexed pre-to-post changes in communication: both pair types showed more task-oriented utterances and speaker changes after the castle game, but not after the tangram games.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study was small and preliminary. Participants were selected for enough cognitive and speech ability to complete the tasks, so it does not show what would happen for children with more severe autism or with fine motor or visual-spatial difficulties. The changes were measured within one session, and the authors state this was not an intervention study. Communication coding was done offline by a research team member, not automatically by the system. Pairs were not matched on motor and cognitive impairments.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the pre-to-post improvements as evidence that the virtual environment improves social communication in autism. The study was a single-session feasibility test, not an intervention, and the authors state that effects need further long-term and multi-session evaluation.