What influences human computer interaction in autism?

Psychopathologists express a growing interest in computer assisted cognitive training. Our research aims at understanding how the cognitive profile of users with autism may impact computer interaction. We developed software games to explore training in two different learning fields: visuospatial planning and dialogue understanding. Ten adolescents with high functioning autism participated in a 13 weeks training program based on this software. The experiment was also conducted with a group of 10 typically developing children matched on developmental age and academic level. Our goal was to examine the ability of people with autism to use the modalities available on the human computer interfaces. The software platform that we designed enabled managing interface modalities and logging users´ actions. The dialogue understanding game could be configured with an interface associating the characters´ facial expressions with the dialogue utterances The visuospatial planning game presented a graph on which the participants could trace a route. The analyses of users´ actions suggest that participants with autism followed solving strategies that were less demanding in terms of planning, inhibition and initiative. Results are discussed in the light of the executive dysfunction attributed to autism and its impact on human computer interaction.