Kaspar Explains: The Effect of Causal Explanations on Visual Perspective Taking Skills in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

This paper presents an investigation into the effectiveness of introducing explicit causal explanations in a child-robot interaction setting to help children with autism improve their Visual Perspective Taking (VPT) skills. A sample of ten children participated in three sessions with a social robot on different days, during which they played several games consisting of VPT tasks. In some of the sessions, the robot provided constructive feedback to the children by giving causal explanations related to VPT; other sessions were control sessions without explanations. An analysis of the children’s learning progress revealed that they improved their VPT abilities faster when the robot provided causal explanations. However, both groups ultimately reach a similar ratio of correct answers in later sessions. These findings suggest that providing causal explanations using a social robot can be effective to teach VPT to children with autism. This study paves the way for further exploring a robot’s ability to provide causal explanations in other educational scenarios.