Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 Oct 15;10(1):17380.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-74438-6.

Ordered interpersonal synchronisation in ASD children via robots

Irini Giannopulu  1 , Aude Etournaud  2 , Kazunori Terada  3 , Mari Velonaki  4 , Tomio Watanabe  5
Affiliations

Ordered interpersonal synchronisation in ASD children via robots

Irini Giannopulu et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) experience persistent disrupted coordination in interpersonal synchronisation that is thought to be associated with deficits in neural connectivity. Robotic interventions have been explored for use with ASD children worldwide revealing that robots encourage one-to-one social and emotional interactions. However, associations between interpersonal synchronisation and emotional empathy have not yet been directly explored in French and Japanese ASD children when they interact with a human or a robot under analogous experimental conditions. Using the paradigm of actor-perceiver, where the child was the actor and the robot or the human the perceiver, we recorded the autonomic heart rate activation and reported emotional feelings of ASD children in both countries. Japanese and French ASD children showed different interpersonal synchronisation when they interacted with the human perceiver, even though the human was the same in both countries. However, they exhibited similar interpersonal synchronisation when the perceiver was the robot. The findings suggest that the mechanism combining interpersonal synchronisation and emotional empathy might be weakened but not absent in ASD children and that both French and Japanese ASD children do spontaneously and unconsciously discern non verbal actions of non human partners through a direct matching process that occurs via automatic mapping.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Toy Robot "Pekoppa". The toy robot was used as free of culture or nation affiliation. Pekoppa is the simplest expression of Sakura, which is a voice-driven group of humanoid entrainment systems that reacts to speech sounds by only nodding.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Actor-perceiver paradigm. The actor was always the child; the robot or the human the perceiver.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Heart rate comparison between Japanese and French ASD children in ‘rest’, ‘with human’ and ‘with robot’ condition (*p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; *** p < 0.0001). (a) Japanese ASD-group showed higher heart rate than French children when the partner was the human. (b) Heart rate of both French and Japanese ASD-groups were very similar when the partner was the robot.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Heart rate variability (i.e. LF/HF ratio) comparison between Japanese and French ASD children in ‘rest’, ‘with human’ and ‘with robot" condition (*p < 0.05; *** p < 0.0001). (a) Japanese ASD-group demonstrated higher LF/HF ratio than French children when the partner was the human. (b) LF/HF ratio of both French and Japanese ASD-groups were very similar when the partner was the robot.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Comparison of Emotional feeling reported ‘before’ and ‘after’ the interaction with the robot in Japanese and French ASD children (***p < 0.001). (a) Very similar emotional feelings for both French and Japanese ASD children “before” and "after" the interaction with the robot. (b) Both groups significantly increased their feelings when the partner was the robot and declared that they felt better “after” than “before” the interaction with the robot.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. American Psychiatric Association. Autism spectrum disorders. In Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th edn (2013).
    1. Baron-Cohen, S. Theory of mind and autism: a review. In International Review of Research in Mental Retardation: Autism, Vol. 23, 169–184 (Academic Press, 2001).
    1. Dziobek I, et al. Dissociation of cognitive and emotional empathy in adults with Asperger syndrome using the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET) J. Autism Dev. Disord. 2008;38:464–473. doi: 10.1007/s10803-007-0486-x. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Gallese V. The roots of empathy: the shared manifold hypothesis and the neural basis of intersubjectivity. PSP. 2003;36:171–180. - PubMed
    1. Gerdes KE. Empathy, sympathy, and pity: 21st-century definitions and implications for practice and research. J. Soc. Serv. Res. 2011;37:230–241. doi: 10.1080/01488376.2011.564027. - DOI

Publication types