Developing Joint Attention for Children with Autism in Robot-Enhanced Therapy

Social difficulties is a core symptom of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). One of the main psychological factors supposed to underlie these difficulties is the lack or low levels of joint attention (JA) with the interaction partners. The use of a social robot in ASD interventions has received a lot of attention in the last years. The main objective of this research is to investigate if the JA performance of ASD children is dependent on the social cues that the robot uses in the therapy sessions. Three different types of social cues are adopted: gaze orientation, pointing and vocal instruction. Furthermore, our study aims also to investigate if the robot-enhanced treatment produces similar patterns in comparison with a standard human treatment. For testing our hypothesis, we have used a single case design involving five children with ASD who received 20 intervention sessions. The results pointed to a very consistent pattern across all types of sessions: using more cues for prompting JA increases the performance of the children. These findings emphasize the importance of using more cues, such as pointing, for increasing engagement and performance engagement in a child–robot interaction session.