Aspies For Freedom

To most people, the human face is a compelling object fraught with meaning. But for autistic children, who can't get a read on other people's emotions, eye contact is terrifying. When they do look at faces, they tend to stare at the mouth. Fortunately, researchers now think that technology can help overcome the barrier that isolates these kids. Software that enables robots to respond to a child's feelings a little bit—but not too much—can help train him or her to interact more freely with people. "The beauty of a robot or software is that it's not human," and therefore not as intimidating, says Stephen Porges, an autism expert at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Computer-generated faces are already having an impact in the classroom. Psychologist Dominic Massaro at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has created Baldi, a lively computer character, as a stand-in for human teachers. For three years, Baldi and his female counterpart, Baldette, have been giving autistic kids in the Bay School in Santa Cruz lessons in vocabulary and in understanding facial expressions. The character has been so successful that he's spawned imitators—Baldini in Italian, Baldir in Arabic and Bao in Chinese.

Porges thinks that the real role of cartoon personas is not so much to teach patients as to calm them. Autistic kids live in a state of hyperalertness, as if they were constantly suffering stage fright. If technology can put them at ease, Porges argues, social skills will develop naturally. In a recent study, Porges exposed 20 autistic people, ranging from 10 to 21 years old, to engineered speech and music. He removed low frequency sounds, which the body tends to interpret as indicating danger, and exaggerated vocal intonations, much as people dramatize emotions when speaking to infants. After 45 minutes, all but one of the subjects began looking at the eyes of a person on a video screen just as a normal viewer would. The improvement persisted at least a week, but had faded after six months. Porges is now developing headphones that reduce low frequencies. He also hopes to test whether ongoing exposure to the engineered sounds can lead to long-term improvement.

Other technology may be effective for less severely autistic children. Whereas normal babies learn from caretakers to mirror emotions—smile at a smile, frown at a frown—autistic children often lack this basic skill. Cognitive scientists Javier Movellan and Marian Stewart Bartlett at the University of California, San Diego, have built a robot that can "read" faces. They hope that playing with the robot and watching it interact with others will inspire autistic children to return the smiles of humans.

Full article - http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7000185/site/newsweek/

eye contact is terrifying

It is? I never liked to make eye contact with people when I was younger because I thought it rude because their words would be saying one thing and their eyes another (if you catch my drift) and it was as though I was calling the person a liar because the two sets of information were telling different stories so I'd be stuck as to what they wanted me to do  :? Messes with your head that does
At other times it was too much information coming in at once and I couldn't concentrate on what they were trying to say  :roll:

This is interesting.  I never used exaggerated "baby talk" with my kids because it felt very awkward to me.  When they were small, I generally talked to them the same way I would have talked to an adult, but with simpler sentence structures.

I remember feeling uncomfortable with overly dramatized emotions in other people's speech when I was a child.  I felt that it broke the usual pattern of conversation and made me an object of unpredictable actions by adults.

Anyone else feel the same way?

The way people talk is often very irritating to me. Maybe people would think I should be more tolerant, but it grates in my mind and its hard to bear.

Me too, I never really talked to Amber with baby talk, except when I was being a goof or silly old dad and make her laugh.  My NT in-laws never did either.  I'm very sensitive to vocal tones and can smell out whether I'm being bullied or condescended to.  Which grates me to no end!!  Listening to Bush or his cronies makes me change channel or push the mute button PDQ!! :mad:


Peace