Virtual environments for social skills intervention: current findings and future challenges

Abstract

Improving social understanding through social skills training for children and people with autism remains a high priority for parents, teachers and practitioners. At the core of an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) lies a fundamental difficulty in understanding, relating and responding to the social world and this can have a substantial impact on friendships, long-term health, life chances and opportunities. Consequently, many research efforts have focused on developing programmes or approaches to learning and intervention that specifically target social and life skills. Early (behavioural) intervention for children with autism has demonstrated that remarkable gains in learning and behaviour can be made for some children under some circumstances (see Baker and Feinfield, 2003, for a recent review). For older children and young adults with autism there have been some more cognitively-based approaches to improving understanding of social skills, with varying degrees of success (see Parsons & Mitchell, 2002 for a review). My own research has considered the role that technology – specifically Virtual Reality Technology (VRT) - may play in supporting social skills learning and development in adolescents with ASDs. This chapter summarises the potential strengths of this approach as well as some of the findings from recent research. I will then move on to consider the implications and challenges of this research for future intervention.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Sarah Parsons: orcid.org/0000-0002-2542-4745

Catalogue record

Export record