25275
Novel and Surprising Touchscreen Game Elements Can Motivate Spontaneous Communication from Children with Autism
Objectives: Evaluate a new set of games to determine whether deliberate inclusion of novel and surprising elements can motivate spontaneous, positive initiations about game content, similar to the interactions seen in ECHOES.
Methods: Three new games were developed, based on the simple, exploratory, cause-and-effect play in the original ECHOES environment. In one, children sorted apples by colour; two centred on growing flowers or carrots by shaking a magic cloud. Each game had a “baseline” and a “discrepant” version. After the baseline versions were familiar to children (session 1), additional objects and properties were introduced to create “discrepant” versions, with novel and surprising elements (sessions 2-3). Surprises included altered object appearances, sound effects, and timings between events. A character also made occasional “mistakes” with his actions and utterances. These things were predicted to interest children and pose opportunities for them to spontaneously initiate communication. A proof-of-concept scale school study in the UK (10 autistic children age 5-11 years, 2 female, phrase language use) evaluated the new games’ effectiveness at motivating communication with an adult social partner. Children played the games individually, over 3 short sessions (mean 48 minutes total play /child).
Results: In 580 min of gameplay video, there were 409 spontaneous initiations to the adult researcher or game character, related to discrepancies (range 11-79 initiations, mean= 40.9/child). In an additional 241 instances, children reacted to discrepancies in a non-socially-directed way. 46% of these initiations were about game elements deliberately included to create discrepant (novel or surprising) situtations. Children also initiated about “non-designed” discrepancies: genuine system errors, and subjectively perceived changes or differences. Across all children, there were very few instances of negative affect. The games appeared both motivating, and emotionally manageable.
Conclusions: The current strategy of including novel and surprising game elements appears to have been successful in motivating spontaneous social communication for a diverse group of autistic children. It merits further investigation with a wider age/ability range, and with other types of technology. These findings are an early step towards determining whether this strategy may contribute to a future technology-based intervention for autism, capable of changing children’s initiation behaviour outside of a game context.