Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. recently published a study in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking that investigated the effectiveness of a virtual conversation simulator in enhancing the conversational integrity of adults with autism.

A hallmark of autism is a degree of difficulty in communicating with other individuals, particularly in social interactions that require insight into and awareness of non-verbal conversational clues.  Many individuals with autism have normal intelligence levels but struggle with social situations.  Doctors from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. and SIMmersion LLC in Columbia, Maryland, engaged adults with autism in a virtual conversation simulation program.  The prototypical program was designed to assess the value of such a program for individuals, specifically adults, with autism (ScienceDaily).

The study’s participants included 12 adolescents and adults with autism.  These individuals engaged in a virtual conversation simulator with an onscreen partner designed to replication realistic feedback triggered by the participant’s conversation responses (Trapgnier, C.Y., Olsen, D.E., Boteler, L., & Bell, C.A., 2011).  After two weeks, the participants were asked to use a Likert-type scale to rate the degree to which they found the simulator beneficial.  Study participants rated the simulator as highly beneficial.

One of the particular deficits associated with autism is the ability to understand and utilize pragmatic language, specifically elements of pragmatic language that often arise during conversations.  The researchers’ prototype rated individuals on their ability to manipulate, maintain and pleasantly conclude conversations on various topics, not just the participant’s preferred topics (Trapgnier, C.Y., Olsen, D.E., Boteler, L., & Bell, C.A., 2011).  This initial prototype for a virtual conversation simulator program supports the development of a more sophisticated program to investigate the degree to which virtual conversation simulators actually improve upon the pragmatic language skills of individuals with ASD.

Camp Academia, Inc. offers tutoring services for students with learning disabilities, and is particularly successful with individuals with ASD.  Camp Academia, Inc. has offices in Columbus and LaGrange, Georgia, and utilizes BrainJogging, its patented cognitive processing software.

Trepagnier, C.Y., Olsen, D.E., Boteler, L., and Bell, C.A. (2011). Virtual conversation partner for adults with autism [Abstract]. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 21(7).

Autism Spectrum Disorders are characterized by social deficits, among other things. Accurately reading and understanding facial expressions is difficult for individuals on the spectrum.  Reading and understanding facial expressions is key in social situations, but also required for magic tricks that require misdirection, or the magician’s encouraging audience members to watch his or her face while he or she completes the “magic” with his or her hands. Click here to see an example of an amateur magician demonstrating the vanishing ball trick.

Magicians rely heavily on misdirection, on drawing attention to one place to detract from the “magic” occurring elsewhere.  Audiences watch the magicians’ face and are either taken in by his expression or they aren’t, depending on the degree to which they attend to the magician’s face rather than his hands.  Researchers at Brunel University hypothesized that “people with autism should be less susceptible to such social manipulation,” as they are less susceptible to social cues, and be less likely to be taken by a magic trick (Science Daily).

For the purposes of this study, 15 teenagers with autism and 16 without autism watched a video of a magician performing a “vanishing-ball illusion,” in which a magician tosses a ball into the air a few times and, on the last throw, merely makes a tossing motion and looks upward, as though following the ball’s trajectory, while the ball is actually hidden safely in his hand.  Subjects were asked to watch the video of this trick and then mark where they last saw the ball on a frozen image of the magician.  The ball actually last appeared in the magician’s hand, as he never threw it into the air on the last “throw,” but many subjects, including those with autism, marked a position higher up on the screen, as though the ball were ascending or descending.

Gustav Kuhn, in the Visual Cognition Lab at Brunel, is a study author with Anastasia Kourkoulou and Susan R. Leekam.  Kuhn stated the group “strongly suspected that individuals with autism should be using the social cues less than typically developing individuals” and that these individuals with autism would be more likely to watch the ball rather than the magician’s face.  In actuality, the people with autism “were much more likely to think the magician had thrown the ball.”  Kuhn suggested that this may be because the test subjects with autism are all students at a special college for autism and may have been trained to rely on social cues.  However, when Kuhn inspected where the individuals with autism fixed their eyes, he realized that, “like normally-developing people, they looked first at the magician’s face – but their eyes took longer to fix there.”  Additionally, the individuals with autism “had more trouble fixing their eyes on the ball.”

Kuhn hopes to repeat the experiment with children on the spectrum, as they may have had less coaching in attending to social cues.

Autism is strongly genetic and highly prevalent.  Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by “impaired social interaction and communication, and can disrupt the brain’s ability to interpret the movements of other people, known as ‘biological motion'” (Science Daily).  Interpreting others’ motions feeds into the social impairment associated with ASD; if individuals cannot interpret motion or read into the significance of those motions, they cannot understand these motions’ implications.Researchers from the Yale School of Medicine conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify brain activity that “may characterize the genetic vulnerability to developing ASD.”  In order to identify this genetic vulnerability, and potential means of overcoming this vulnerability, researchers scanned the brains of children with autism and their unaffected siblings, in addition to typically developing children’s brains, as the groups “watched animations of biological movement.” The team identified three “‘neural signatures’: trait markers – brain regions with reduced activity in children with ASD and their unaffected siblings; state markers – brain areas with reduced activity found only in children with autism; and compensatory activity – enhanced activity seen only in unaffected siblings.” The enhanced activity exhibited by siblings of individuals with ASD may provide insight into the ways in which one sibling overcomes genetic vulnerability to the disorder.

Brainjogging increases brain activity by facilitating the growth of new neurons and more expedient communication between these neurons.  Individuals with ASD have atypical brain activity; Brainjogging increases these individuals’ brain activity, bringing it up to a more typical level.

In November of 2009, Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI) researchers conducted the first study on handwriting quality in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).  The study confirmed that handwriting is a real problem for individuals with autism.  Children with autism struggle to form letters correctly, although their “size, alignment and spacing… [is] comparable to typically developing children” (KKI).  The root cause, as identified by KKI researchers, was fine motor control.  The study compared “handwriting samples, motor skills and visuospatial abilities of children with ASD to typically developing children” (KKI).A subsequent study, conducted in November 2010 and published in the 16 November 2010 of Neurology, suggests that handwriting problems in children with ASD continue into teen years (ages 12 to 16).  Two groups, each consisting of 12 individuals with ASD or unaffected by the disorder, were examined.  The group of adolescents with ASD exhibited “poor handwriting and motor skill impairments when compared to typically developing peers” (KKI).  However, in the adolescent group, perceptual reasoning abilities were the greatest indicator of handwriting deficits.  Perceptual reasoning abilities “reflect a person’s ability to reason through problems with nonverbal material” (Science Daily).   Out of 204 possible points, the adolescents with autism earned only 167 points, compared to 183 earned by typically developing peers.

Dr. Amy Bastian, the study author, stated, “There are several techniques available to improve handwriting quality, such as adjusting pencil grip, stabilizing the writing hand with the opposite hand or forming letters more slowly.”

The techniques of which Dr. Bastian speaks are all excellent for lessening the degree of handwriting problems, but they do not address the neurological basis for the problems.   Brainjogging actually improves students’ visuospatial abilities and perceptual reasoning, which allows students with autism to realize a difference in their handwriting, among other benefits.