Do Sensory Preferences of Children with Autism Impact an Imitation Task with a Robot?

Imitation is of major importance during social interactions, would it be between humans or between a human and a robot. This is even more true when considering users with special needs. In this paper, we describe an experimental imitation task protocol using a robot Nao that we designed to assess whether sensory profiles of children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) influence their capabilities to imitate or to initiate gestures that are going to be imitated. We based our work on the hypothesis that children with an overreliance on proprioceptive cues and hyporeactivity to visual cues have a greater difficulty imitating and improve their skills more slowly than children with an overreliance on visual cues and hyporeactivity to proprioceptive cues. Twelve children and teenagers with ASD participated in seven imitation sessions over eight weeks. As expected, we observed that children with an overreliance on proprioceptive cues and hyporeactivity to visual cues had more difficulties imitating the robot than the other children. Moreover, the repeated sessions revealed to have positive effects on social behaviors displayed by all children (gaze to the partner, imitations) toward a human partner after the sessions with the robot. We conclude on the possible impacts of such results on the design of social human-robot interactions for users with ASD.