Examining the Effectiveness of Human-Robotic Interaction on the Executive Functions of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by persistent deficits in social interactions and communication along with repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. It is a chronic and debilitating psychiatric condition of children with cognitive impairment. One of the damaged areas in these children is executive functions, a topic of great interest for investigation in autism. The psychological components of executive functions include attention, memory, and response inhibition problems. Technological interventions show remarkable results in improving social communication skills in children with ASD. Therefore, developing and implementing new interventions focusing on cognitive functions can be helpful. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of human–robot interaction on executive functions (working memory, sustained attention, and response inhibition) in people with ASD.

The research method was quasi–experimental with a pretest–posttest design and a control group. The study's statistical population comprised all children aged 6 to 10 years referred to counseling and psychology clinics in Mashhad City, Iran, diagnosed with ASD in 2017. The study sample included 32 children selected through available sampling and were randomly assigned to the intervention and control groups. The inclusion criteria were as follows: having a diagnosis of ASD, not participating in other treatment programs at the same time, not receiving individual counseling or using psychiatric drugs, living with their parents, providing written consent form of parents, and willingness of children to cooperate and participate in the intervention. The exclusion criteria were as follows: not attending more than two training sessions and suffering from a physical or mental illness that occurred during the sessions. The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM–5 Disorders: Clinician Version (First, 2015) and Childhood Autism Rating Scale (Schopler et al., 1980) were used to select the sample group. The study data were gathered via a Computerized N–Back Task (Jaeggi et al., 2010) and the Integrated Visual and Auditory (IVA) test (Arble et al., 2014). In the intervention group, human–robotic interaction group training was conducted in twelve 60–minute sessions, three times a week. However, the control group did not receive any intervention. Descriptive (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (analysis of covariance and the independent t test) were used at a significance level of 0.05 in SPSS version 21 software to describe and analyze the data.

Findings showed that after removing the effect of the pretest, there was a significant difference between the average posttest scores of the experimental group and the control group in the variables of execution speed (p<0.001), sustained visual attention (p<0.001), and visual response inhibition (p<0.001). Also, based on the effect size, 68%, 50%, and 31% of the variable score changes were respectively due to human–robotic interaction intervention.

Based on the findings of this study, human–robotic interaction intervention effectively improves the executive functions of children with ASD. Therefore, this method and other existing interventions can be useful and effective.