Tandra T. Allen

Virtual Reality Social Cognition Training for children with high functioning autism

Virtual reality appears to be a promising and motivating platform to safely practice and rehearse social skills for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). However, the literature to date is subject to limitations in elucidating the effectiveness of these virtual reality interventions. This study investigated the impact of a Virtual Reality Social Cognition Training to enhance social skills in children with ASD. Thirty children between the ages of 7-16 diagnosed with ASD completed 10, 1-h sessions across 5 weeks. Three primary domains were measured pre-post: emotion recognition, social attribution, attention and executive function. Results revealed improvements on measures of emotion recognition, social attribution, and executive function of analogical reasoning. These preliminary findings suggest that the use of a virtual reality platform offers an effective treatment option for improving social impairments commonly found in ASD. The VR-SCT provides an interactive and stimulating approach for children with ASD.The VR-SCT can improve social cognitive skills in children with ASD.Training improved emotion recognition, social attribution, and executive function.The training is a safe and socially non-threatening platform.

The Wechsler ACS Social Perception Subtest: A Preliminary Comparison With Other Measures of Social Cognition

Relative to other cognitive areas, there are few clinical measures currently available to assess social perception. A new standardized measure, the Wechsler Advanced Clinical Solutions (ACS) Social Perception subtest, addresses some limitations of existing measures; however, little is known about this new test. The first goal of this investigation was to preliminarily explore the relationship of the ACS Social Perception subtest to five other measures of social perception and cognition in a sample of control subjects and individuals with Asperger Syndrome and schizophrenia. A secondary goal was to preliminarily explore the differences between groups on six measures of social perception and cognition. Results revealed several significant correlations between the ACS Social Perception subtest and other measures of social cognition, and some evidence for the distinguishing abilities of the measure. The ACS Social Perception subtest appears to be a promising measure for the evaluation of social perceptive skills.

Brain responses to biological motion predict treatment outcome in young adults with autism receiving Virtual Reality Social Cognition Training: Preliminary findings

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by remarkable heterogeneity in social, communication, and behavioral deficits, creating a major barrier in identifying effective treatments for a given individual with ASD. To facilitate precision medicine in ASD, we utilized a well-validated biological motion neuroimaging task to identify pretreatment biomarkers that can accurately forecast the response to an evidence-based behavioral treatment, Virtual Reality-Social Cognition Training (VR-SCT). In a preliminary sample of 17 young adults with high-functioning ASD, we identified neural predictors of change in emotion recognition after VR-SCT. The predictors were characterized by the pretreatment brain activations to biological vs. scrambled motion in the neural circuits that support (a) language comprehension and interpretation of incongruent auditory emotions and prosody, and (b) processing socio-emotional experience and interpersonal affective information, as well as emotional regulation. The predictive value of the findings for individual adults with ASD was supported by regression-based multivariate pattern analyses with cross validation. To our knowledge, this is the first pilot study that shows neuroimaging-based predictive biomarkers for treatment effectiveness in adults with ASD. The findings have potentially far-reaching implications for developing more precise and effective treatments for ASD.

Development of a low-cost tactile sleeve for autism intervention

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a pervasive disorder that can cause sensory-perceptual anomalies, such as a hypersensitivity to contact with other people. We have designed and developed a tactile sleeve to help ASD patients potentially learn how to manage hypersensitivities to human contact through virtual experiences of being touched. Our tactile sleeve simulates both simple and dynamic social touches on the upper arm of the user. These touch gestures are perceived from phantom tactile sensations and apparent tactile motions that are generated by a rectangular grid of vibrotactile actuators. Our design requirements for the sleeve included being inexpensive to produce and integrable with prior ASD intervention software. We describe our formative process for developing the sleeve and conclude with details of our final prototype.

An investigation of reasoning by analogy in schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder

Relational reasoning ability relies upon by both cognitive and social factors. We compared analogical reasoning performance in healthy controls (HC) to performance in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and individuals with schizophrenia (SZ). The experimental task required participants to find correspondences between drawings of scenes. Participants were asked to infer which item within one scene best matched a relational item within the second scene. We varied relational complexity, presence of distraction, and type of objects in the analogies (living or non-living items). We hypothesized that the cognitive differences present in SZ would reduce relational inferences relative to ASD and HC. We also hypothesized that both SZ and ASD would show lower performance on living item problems relative to HC due to lower social function scores. Overall accuracy was higher for HC relative to SZ, consistent with prior research. Across groups, higher relational complexity reduced analogical responding, as did the presence of non-living items. Separate group analyses revealed that the ASD group was less accurate at making relational inferences in problems that involved mainly non-living items and when distractors were present. The SZ group showed differences in problem type similar to the ASD group. Additionally, we found significant correlations between social cognitive ability and analogical reasoning, particularly for the SZ group. These results indicate that differences in cognitive and social abilities impact the ability to infer analogical correspondences along with numbers of relational elements and types of objects present in the problems.

Insight and empathy in schizophrenia

Age (years) 32.26 (5.58) 27.19 (5.17) −2.99 .005⁎ Education (years) 12.63 (1.61) 14.60 (2.21) 3.19 .003⁎⁎ Estimated FSIQ 102.24 (14.81) 112.10 (10.22) 2.33 .03⁎ Social EQ 5.11 (3.40) 7.79 (2.27) 2.96 .001⁎ Cognitive EQ 9.89 (6.33) 15.63 (9.89) 3.01 b .001⁎⁎ Emotional EQ 8.89 (4.15) 14.00 (4.19) 3.77 .001⁎⁎ Total EQ 35.47 (11.88) 51.21 (13.06) 3.89 b .001⁎⁎ QIDS 11.37 (5.71) 4.23 (2.65) −4.75 b .001⁎ SUMD-AV 4.50 (1.76) Positive PANSS 18.93 (4.31) Negative PANSS 16.5 (4.47) General PANSS 37.14 (4.72) Total PANSS 72.57 (11.11)

A modified tactile brush algorithm for complex touch gestures

Several researchers have investigated phantom tactile sensation (i.e., the perception of a nonexistent actuator between two real actuators) and apparent tactile motion (i.e., the perception of a moving actuator due to time delays between onsets of multiple actuations). Prior work has focused primarily on determining appropriate Durations of Stimulation (DOS) and Stimulus Onset Asynchronies (SOA) for simple touch gestures, such as a single finger stroke. To expand upon this knowledge, we investigated complex touch gestures involving multiple, simultaneous points of contact, such as a whole hand touching the arm. To implement complex touch gestures, we modified the Tactile Brush algorithm to support rectangular areas of tactile stimulation.

Neural mechanisms of behavioral change in young adults with high-functioning autism receiving virtual reality social cognition training: A pilot study.

Measuring treatment efficacy in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) relies primarily on behaviors, with limited evidence as to the neural mechanisms underlying these behavioral gains. This pilot study addresses this void by investigating neural and behavioral changes in a Phase I trial in young adults with high‐functioning ASD who received an evidence‐based behavioral intervention, Virtual Reality‐Social Cognition Training over 5 weeks for a total of 10 hr. The participants were tested pre‐ and post‐training with a validated biological/social versus scrambled/nonsocial motion neuroimaging task, previously shown to activate regions within the social brain networks. Three significant brain‐behavior changes were identified. First, the right posterior superior temporal sulcus, a hub for socio‐cognitive processing, showed increased brain activation to social versus nonsocial stimuli in individuals with greater gains on a theory‐of‐mind measure. Second, the left inferior frontal gyrus, a region for socio‐emotional processing, tracked individual gains in emotion recognition with decreased activation to social versus nonsocial stimuli. Finally, the left superior parietal lobule, a region for visual attention, showed significantly decreased activation to nonsocial versus social stimuli across all participants, where heightened attention to nonsocial contingencies has been considered a disabling aspect of ASD. This study provides, albeit preliminary, some of the first evidence of the harnessable neuroplasticity in adults with ASD through an age‐appropriate intervention in brain regions tightly linked to social abilities. This pilot trial motivates future efforts to develop and test social interventions to improve behaviors and supporting brain networks in adults with ASD. Autism Res 2018, 11: 713–725.

Subjective evaluation of tactile fidelity for single-finger and whole-hand touch gestures

This paper presents a study on the effects of tactile fidelity—the degree of exactness with which real-world tactile stimuli are reproduced—on the perception of single-finger and whole-hand touch gestures. We developed an arm-based tactile display consisting of a four-by-three grid of linear resonant actuator motors to facilitate our investigation. This device supported two extreme levels of tactile fidelity by using an extension of the previously defined Tactile Brush algorithm. At the highest level, all twelve motors could be used to provide an average displayed tactile resolution of one actuation per 12 cm2. At the lowest level, the four corner motors of the grid could be used to provide an average displayed tactile resolution of one actuation per 36 cm2. We conducted a study in which every participant blindly compared these two levels of tactile fidelity for four single-finger touch gestures and six whole-hand touch gestures. Our results indicated that the higher level of tactile fidelity was significantly preferred and accepted for all six whole-hand touch gestures and for two of the four single-finger gestures. We discuss the implications of these results for the development of grid-based tactile displays and provide some virtual reality application areas that could take advantage of using whole-hand touch gestures.