Question: "I’m researching whether technology influences how children with autism interact with other people"- what is the most interesting finding you have fouund while researching this?

Maggi Laurie answered on 14 Jun 2017:

I’m in the early stages of my research project (and currently setting up my first study with autistic children), so haven’t got any findings of my own, but I’ve been reading lots of interesting papers!

I think the most lovely and interesting finding was from a project where they designed a virtual game (shown on a large touch-screen), and the children had to interact with a virtual character on the screen. The virtual character asked the children to ‘help him pick some flowers’ (also on the screen) and the character would point at the flowers the children had to ‘pick’ (bearing in mind that children with autism often do not follow these types of cues and appear to ignore them). They found that not only could the autistic children do this task, and do it very well (and get almost all of the trials ‘correct’ – i.e. follow where a virtual character was directing them), but the children started talking to the research assistant who was sitting next to the screen, controlling the virtual character. The children would say to her “Look at me, I finished the game!” or “Oh, I like the flowers!.” What is interesting about this is that not only could the children successfully interact with a virtual character, but this was followed by successful interactions with a real-life person!