Effects of a Robot-Enhanced Intervention for Children With ASD on Teaching Turn-Taking Skills - Daniel O. David, Cristina A. Costescu, Silviu Matu, Aurora Szentagotai, Anca Dobrean, 2020

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• abnormalities in social interactions and communication, as well as severely restricted interests, and highly repetitive behaviors

• children with autism spectrum disorder aged between 3 and 5 years. Each child receives 20 intervention sessions (8 robot-enhanced sessions—robot-enhanced treatment (RET), 8 standard human sessions—standard human treatment, and 4 sessions with the intervention that was more efficient)

• children benefit to a similar extent from both interventions

• children seemed to see their robotic partner as being more interesting

• social communication

• social-emotional reciprocity

• turn-taking requires children to maintain their turn

• and take the listener’s perspective which is often very challenging for children with ASD

• humans manage to understand when to start and stop their turns in social interactions

• based on the context and purpose of the interaction and on the feedback from the social interaction partners

• studies promote the idea that social robots should be used as mediators to teach children with ASD social and cognitive abilities that are difficult to learn from standard interactions with adults

• the robot should be used in personalized evidence-based psychotherapy framework, where the robot should be seen as a technical tool that can help the therapist to accomplish their clinical aims

• The choice for a robot-enhanced approach for psychological intervention in ASD is justified also by the embodiment of the robot, which offers human-like social cues while keeping at the same time object-like simplicity. This issue is a really important one when addressing children with ASD, especially because the complexity of human behaviors (e.g., facial expressions) may not allow them to learn properly when interacting with people

• Individuals with ASD usually analyze a system in terms of the rules that govern it, to predict its behavior, which makes the interaction with a robot easier to understand compared with the interaction with another human being

• difference between working with a social robot (Probo) and a human therapist for improving the social skills of children with ASD

• Results revealed that the use of a social robot for training social skills was more effective compared with standard therapy

• longitudinal study using a simple robot Keepon to establish a triadic interaction between a child, the robot, and the therapist, and they noticed that Keepon played a pivot role in the triadic interaction

• all the skills trained during these type of intervention needs to be generalized and transferred in real-life settings

• ultimate goal

• both studies, the children seemed to enjoy better the interaction with the robot compared with the interaction with the human partner