Enhancing social problem solving in children with autism and normal children through computer-assisted instruction

Children with autism have difficulty in solving social problems and in gene rating multiple solutions to problems. They are, however, relatively skille d in responding to visual cues such as pictures and animations. Eight disti nct social problems were presented on a computer, along with a choice of po ssible solutions, and an option to produce alternative solutions. Eight pre school children with autism and eight matched normal children went through 10 training sessions interleaved with 6 probe sessions. Children were asked to provide solutions to animated problem scenes in all the sessions. Unlik e the probe sessions, in the training sessions problem solutions were first explained thoroughly by the trainer. Subsequently these explanations were illustrated using dynamic animations of the solutions. Although children wi th autism produced significantly fewer alternative solutions compared to th eir normal peers, a steady increase across probe sessions was observed for the autistic group. The frequency of new ideas was directly predicted by th e diagnostic category of autism. Results suggest young children with autism and their normal peers can be taught problem-solving strategies with the a id of computer interfaces. More research is required to establish whether s uch computer-assisted instruction will generalize to nontrained problem sit uations in real-life contexts.