Using Virtual Reality Enhanced Behavioral Skills Training to Teach Street Crossing Skills to Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Background: Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) often have poor safety skills due to insensitivity to subtle environmental cues and poor problem solving in the face of stressful tasks. Behavioral skills training (BST), consisting of instructions, modeling, rehearsal, and feedback, is effective for teaching safety skills and the effects improve with in situ training. However, creating realistic and safe contexts for rehearsal of skills such as street crossing may prove logistically difficult, if not impossible. Virtual reality (VR) affords a potential solution by allowing a child to interact meaningfully in an environment that is specifically designed to promote learning and generalization.

Objectives: To evaluate a partially immersive VR enhanced BST intervention for teaching safe street crossing to children and adolescents with ASDs.

Methods: A nonconcurrent multiple baseline design across 5 participants was employed to demonstrate experimental control in the virtual environment. Additionally, a within subject repeated measures design was used to determine the effects of training on skills in the natural environment. Data analysis was conducted via visual inspection of graphed performance.

Results: All participants mastered the skill set within the virtual environment and improved from pre-test to post-test in the natural environment, with some participants demonstrating treatment gains following the initial phases of BST.

Conclusions: VR affords incomparable control for arrangement of environments that best promote learning and generalization (e.g., removal and gradual introduction of distracting stimuli, exaggeration and normalization of critical stimulus features, and creation of limitless training examples to promote generalization). Results from the current study indicate that blending traditional teaching, in the form of BST, and technology, in the form of VR, is beneficial for children and adolescents with ASDs.