A Multi-User Tabletop Application to Train Children with Autism Social Attention Coordination Skills without Forcing Eye-Gaze Following

Abstract

Social attention coordination skills are central to the overall joint attention development. Previous research for children with neurotypical developing (NT) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has largely focused on one pathway of coordinating visual attention via gaze following with a social partner. However given the much higher reluctance of individuals with ASD to make eye contact, other pathways of visual attention coordination might be more satisfying. Such a possible pathway might be the hand-eye coordination which was observed to lead to successful social attention coordination between physically active infants and their parents. Motivated by prior works on the benefits of tabletop-based applications for ASD children, in this paper, we unfold a multi-user tabletop pattern-matching game to train ASD children social attention coordination skills via hand-eye coupling, that is, manipulation of screen-objects (puzzles with different patterns) in goal-directed tasks is achieved by alternating eye-gaze between screen-objects in one's own private space and another one in a shared space.