VE: a tool for testing imitative capacities of low-functioning children with autism

Equipped with our knowledge of developmental indices (Nadel & Butterworth, 1999), we have started an exploration of imitative capacities in low-functioning children with autism. Such an exploration is needed, since results in this area are controversial, with authors claiming that children with autism have specific impairments in the domain of imitation, others (saying that the imitative deficits are not specific to autism but more generally include children with different developmental impairments with dysphasia and more specifically with language impairments and still others like us denying noticeable deficits in low-level imitation in children with autism. Our stance is based on the idea that a hierarchy of mechanisms are at play when we imitate according of the kind of imitation we use, from low-level use of mirror neurons in perception-action coupling to high-level mechanism involved in the representation of actions or program of actions (Rizzlolatti et al., 2002). The relatively late diagnosis of autism suggests that early motor development is not specifically impaired. We thus postulate the integrity of perception-action coupling in autism. The major impairment of children in autism lies in social component, therefore, it is of major interest to try to distinguish what in imitative performance is due to motor and cognitive capacities and what is due to capacities to relate with partners. We propose an experiment with 3 interactive conditions: an on-line condition, where a real partner asks the child to do like him/her, an off-line condition, where a televised partner asks to do like him/her, a virtual environment condition where the virtual partner asks the child to do like him/her. The imitative performance of the children is the discriminant variable. Such a project would need us to answer to several pre-requisites: is it possible for low-functioning children with autism as well as for young infants to discriminate between virtual reality and real life? To our own knowledge the attempts to make persons with autism interacting in a virtual environment were always performed with adults or adolescents and with high functioning persons. With young and low-functioning children with autism however, the mastery of such complex situations is far from being obvious and we need at first to process an analysis of the different components of the context which can lead to differentiate virtual environment from real life. This is the reason why the virtual environment we will test is very simple. It is composed of only one avatar displayingtwo facial expressions with no eye-to-eye contact and proposing several simple actions, with only one sentence "do like me". A demonstration of the virtual environment design will be provided by ITIN group