Question: do you think that this can also cause people with autism to be worse in face-to-face interactions as they wouldn't necassarily know about personal space and etc

Maggi Laurie answered on 9 Jun 2017:

Hi Kayleigh, thanks for your question.

Autistic people can find face-to-face interaction uncomfortable, not interesting, or really uncomfortable. When it comes to face-to-face interaction and technology, there is perhaps a worry that if children, and particularly autistic children, spend a lot of time looking at screens (which aren’t faces) they won’t learn how to interact with faces. However, nobody has properly tested this out properly and provided good evidence that this is the case. But I can say that there are lots of tablet applications and even a few robots available to teach autistic children how to recognize emotional faces (e.g. happy, sad), and some of these seem to work a little bit. And now that technology is becoming more mobile-based (e.g. smaller screens, even technology without screens) it is easier now to have face-to-face interaction whilst using technology.

Autistic people can also find it hard to respect other people’s personal space, and might have different boundaries when it comes to personal space. Whilst technology is becoming smaller, like with smart phones, it might be more difficult for an autistic person to interact with another person whilst they are using technology, as someone else needs to enter their space to engage with both the person and the technology. However, there’s many many ways that people can interact with other people that don’t involve personal space or faces that can be facilitated by technology (e.g. instant messengers, webcams and Skype, playing online games with other people).

Your question is really great and something I do hope I might be able to answer with my own research findings one day. In sum, there’s no real evidence that technology is particularly bad for human-human interaction, and the same is for technology and interaction in autistic people. However, it is a worry, but there are many other ways to interact with other people that don’t involve personal space or faces.