The autism spectrum as a source of cognitive and cultural diversity

Individual differences in perception and in social cognition are products of both biology and cultural experience. Many of the same differences that typify autism when they occur in extremes also underlie normal human cognitive variation when they occur to more subtle degrees. In particular, autism spectrum conditions are characterised by low degrees of two linked capacities: level of construal, meaning the tendency to represent percepts as individual details rather than as whole contexts; and psychological distance, meaning the tendencies to perceive objects and events in distant rather than peri-personal space, to recall or to anticipate past or future time rather than the here-and-now, to approach social interactions in the allocentric frame of other people rather than one's own egocentric frame, and to represent hypothetical, counterfactual, or fictional beliefs that are at odds with actual facts. Significantly, culture also exerts linked effects on level of construal and psychological distance, which are relatively increased in more contextual, socially focussed cultures and decreased in more individualistic, self-focussed cultures

Virtual Risk Management—Exploring Effects of Childhood Risk Experiences through Innovative Methods (ViRMa) for Primary School Children in Norway: Study Protocol for the ViRMa Project

Research indicates that risky play benefits children’s risk assessment and risk management skills and offers several positive health effects such as resilience, social skills, physical activity, well-being, and involvement. There are also indications that the lack of risky play and autonomy increases the likelihood of anxiety. Despite its well-documented importance, and the willingness of children to engage in risky play, this type of play is increasingly restricted. Assessing long-term effects of risky play has been problematic because of ethical issues with conducting studies designed to allow or encourage children to take physical risks with the potential of injury.Virtual Risk Management—Exploring Effects of Childhood Risk Experiences through Innovative Methods (ViRMa) for Primary School Children in Norway: Study Protocol for the ViRMa ProjectpublishedVersio

Effects of online advertising on children's visual attention and task performance during free and goal-directed internet use : A media psychology approach to children's website interaction and advert distraction

This dissertation consists of four eye-tracking studies that investigate how salient online advertising and children's level of executive function contributes to their advert distraction. In Study 1, children aged 9 were instructed to surf freely on the internet while all advert material appearing on-screen was registered. The analyses examined how perceptual prominence in each online advert was related to children's visual attention. In Study 2, a mock-up advergame website was designed with controlled advert conditions, and children aged 9 and 12 were instructed to solve a number of in-game tasks. This study investigated the combined effects of perceptual prominence (e.g. abrupt onset) and content relevance (e.g. personalized content) on children's advert distraction. The results of the first two studies showed significant positive effects of advert saliency on children's visual attention. Due to the task-oriented research design used in the second study, it was possible to interpret these effects on visual attention in terms of advert distraction. Both studies showed that higher levels of inhibitory control in children significantly decreased the effects of advert saliency on visual attention and advert distraction.The following two studies, investigated how advert animation affected children's online reading comprehension and information search on commercial websites. In Study 3, children aged 9 were presented with factual texts that they were instructed to read in order to answer comprehension questions. Each text was presented on a web page which also featured static or animated online adverts. In Study 4, children aged 9 were instructed to solve two online task types featuring concurrent online advertising: reading and information search. The results of these studies showed that animated online advertising had significant negative effects on children's task performance. In the third study, it was found that animated adverts had a negative effect on children's reading comprehension, and that this negative effect was stronger among children with low levels of inhibitory control. The fourth study found that advert animation had a significant positive effect on children's cognitive load across task types. Taken together, this dissertation project has studied children's online advert distraction in a wide range of realistic internet usage situations

Human-centred design methods : developing scenarios for robot assisted play informed by user panels and field trials

Original article can be found at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/ Copyright ElsevierThis article describes the user-centred development of play scenarios for robot assisted play, as part of the multidisciplinary IROMEC1 project that develops a novel robotic toy for children with special needs. The project investigates how robotic toys can become social mediators, encouraging children with special needs to discover a range of play styles, from solitary to collaborative play (with peers, carers/teachers, parents, etc.). This article explains the developmental process of constructing relevant play scenarios for children with different special needs. Results are presented from consultation with panel of experts (therapists, teachers, parents) who advised on the play needs for the various target user groups and who helped investigate how robotic toys could be used as a play tool to assist in the children’s development. Examples from experimental investigations are provided which have informed the development of scenarios throughout the design process. We conclude by pointing out the potential benefit of this work to a variety of research projects and applications involving human–robot interactions.Peer reviewe

To leave or not? Parental emigration decisions and human capital development of children

This thesis explores empirically the links between parental migration and educational performance of children, as well as bilingualism and family status and cognitive development of children.The first three chapters focus on a scenario in which households send one member, usually a parent, for temporary employment abroad. I firstly examine the implications of such a family structure on educational performance of teenagers. I then investigate whether this impact may spill over through peer interactions at school.I have designed and collected a survey for the purpose of the analysis. I elaborate on the process in the first chapter. The gathered data contain information about over 2800 16- year -old pupils, including their socio- economic background, performance at school and migration experiences within a family over a period of three years. Parental migration is common in the studied population and is mostly characterised by relatively short, repeated spells of legal employment of fathers in other European countries. The nature of the migration experience sets it apart from cases considered so far.In the second chapter I utilise the data to investigate the relationship between parental absence due to emigration and the child's performance at school in that period. I find that, on average, children's grades improve when they have a parent abroad. A negative impact may, however, emerge in cases of prolonged separation. Meanwhile, sibling emigration exerts a strong positive effect on educational attainment which accumulates over time. The results are plausible if parental emigration significantly increases household income, whilst not disproportionately burdening children by means of increased responsibility.The third chapter extends the analysis by looking at the influence children with parents working abroad may exert on their classmates. I find that pupils in classes with a high proportion of children of migrant parents perform better. The impact is greater for those who experienced family migration themselves. I consider various possible explanations of the result and conclude that the positive individual effect found in the second chapter may spill over through the peer interactions. Increased teachers' involvement in classes with many migrant children may play an additional role.Parental education is key to the positive effects found in both chapters. The children of parents, who have themselves graduated from high school, benefit most from their parents' emigration experience. They also are the influential group among their peers.In the final chapter I consider a different scenario where families use two languages at home to investigate whether it affects the development of cognitive and non -cognitive skills of their children. Importantly, I notice that bilingualism may be an insufficient element to explain any differences, as bilingual families are a heterogeneous group. Therefore, I also differentiate between families with two native, one native, one foreign and two foreign parents.Using the data for families with children under the age of 6 in Scotland, I find that overall children's cognitive and non -cognitive skills are similar. The performance in the English Vocabulary Naming exercise is an exception. On average, bilingual children do not perform worse than monolinguals in the task. There is heterogeneity within the group, however. Bilingual mixed -nationality children lag behind the monolingual native children at the age of 3 but they catch up by the age of 5. However, there is some evidence that bilingual children who have two foreign born parents may perform worse than the monolingual native children and not improve with age

Psychophysiological analysis of a pedagogical agent and robotic peer for individuals with autism spectrum disorders.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by ongoing problems in social interaction and communication, and engagement in repetitive behaviors. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 1 in 68 children in the United States has ASD. Mounting evidence shows that many of these individuals display an interest in social interaction with computers and robots and, in general, feel comfortable spending time in such environments. It is known that the subtlety and unpredictability of people’s social behavior are intimidating and confusing for many individuals with ASD. Computerized learning environments and robots, however, prepare a predictable, dependable, and less complicated environment, where the interaction complexity can be adjusted so as to account for these individuals’ needs. The first phase of this dissertation presents an artificial-intelligence-based tutoring system which uses an interactive computer character as a pedagogical agent (PA) that simulates a human tutor teaching sight word reading to individuals with ASD. This phase examines the efficacy of an instructional package comprised of an autonomous pedagogical agent, automatic speech recognition, and an evidence-based instructional procedure referred to as constant time delay (CTD). A concurrent multiple-baseline across-participants design is used to evaluate the efficacy of intervention. Additionally, post-treatment probes are conducted to assess maintenance and generalization. The results suggest that all three participants acquired and maintained new sight words and demonstrated generalized responding. The second phase of this dissertation describes the augmentation of the tutoring system developed in the first phase with an autonomous humanoid robot which serves the instructional role of a peer for the student. In this tutoring paradigm, the robot adopts a peer metaphor, where its function is to act as a peer. With the introduction of the robotic peer (RP), the traditional dyadic interaction in tutoring systems is augmented to a novel triadic interaction in order to enhance the social richness of the tutoring system, and to facilitate learning through peer observation. This phase evaluates the feasibility and effects of using PA-delivered sight word instruction, based on a CTD procedure, within a small-group arrangement including a student with ASD and the robotic peer. A multiple-probe design across word sets, replicated across three participants, is used to evaluate the efficacy of intervention. The findings illustrate that all three participants acquired, maintained, and generalized all the words targeted for instruction. Furthermore, they learned a high percentage (94.44% on average) of the non-target words exclusively instructed to the RP. The data show that not only did the participants learn nontargeted words by observing the instruction to the RP but they also acquired their target words more efficiently and with less errors by the addition of an observational component to the direct instruction. The third and fourth phases of this dissertation focus on physiology-based modeling of the participants’ affective experiences during naturalistic interaction with the developed tutoring system. While computers and robots have begun to co-exist with humans and cooperatively share various tasks; they are still deficient in interpreting and responding to humans as emotional beings. Wearable biosensors that can be used for computerized emotion recognition offer great potential for addressing this issue. The third phase presents a Bluetooth-enabled eyewear – EmotiGO – for unobtrusive acquisition of a set of physiological signals, i.e., skin conductivity, photoplethysmography, and skin temperature, which can be used as autonomic readouts of emotions. EmotiGO is unobtrusive and sufficiently lightweight to be worn comfortably without interfering with the users’ usual activities. This phase presents the architecture of the device and results from testing that verify its effectiveness against an FDA-approved system for physiological measurement. The fourth and final phase attempts to model the students’ engagement levels using their physiological signals collected with EmotiGO during naturalistic interaction with the tutoring system developed in the second phase. Several physiological indices are extracted from each of the signals. The students’ engagement levels during the interaction with the tutoring system are rated by two trained coders using the video recordings of the instructional sessions. Supervised pattern recognition algorithms are subsequently used to map the physiological indices to the engagement scores. The results indicate that the trained models are successful at classifying participants’ engagement levels with the mean classification accuracy of 86.50%. These models are an important step toward an intelligent tutoring system that can dynamically adapt its pedagogical strategies to the affective needs of learners with ASD

A social goals perspective on bullying in schools

Contrasting approaches to explaining the social-cognitive contributors to bullying in schools have stressed the importance of a child‘s social goals in determining whether he or she will bully. In spite of this, the social goals of bullies and victims have not been adequately investigated in empirical research. This thesis aimed to address this issue by investigating the social goals associated with bullying/victimisation, determining whether these goals were able to predict bullying/victimisation even after other social processing biases and theory of mind had been taken into account, and considering the influence social goals have on children‘s response to provocation. In a series of six studies, 583 children from Primary schools in the UK completed several measures aimed at assessing their engagement in behaviours related to bullying and being victimised, their social goals (both as general interpersonal goals and also specific to hypothetical social scenarios), and other social-cognitive factors (including theory of mind). Although the pattern of results across studies was not always uniform, there was a general trend for bullying in boys to be associated with situation-specific goals that protected their physical dominance within their peer group, while bullying in girls was better predicted by an overall concern for maintaining an image of popularity. Interestingly, victimisation in boys was predicted by an inappropriate concern for others‘ feelings in certain scenarios, while victimisation in girls was associated with a low level of concern for behaving prosocially. Importantly, these kinds of social goals remained predictive of bullying and victimisation even after controlling for variance accounted for by theory of mind and other social information processing biases. Finally, social goals were found to mediate the relationship between bullying/victimisation and aggressive/submissive response strategies. Findings are discussed in relation to the existing literature as well as to their potential impact on intervention strategies

SCORE EQUATING BETWEEN AEPS-2 AND AEPS-3 FOR 0-3 YEAR OLDS

Over the past two decades, the emphasis on educational equity in early childhood education (ECE) and early childhood special education (ECSE) has highlighted the importance of assessment through policies and regulations. Ensuring accurate assessment scores is a fundamental aspect of this trend. The release of the Assessment, Evaluation, and Programming System for Infants and Children, Third Edition (AEPS-3) in December 2021 led to a shift from the Second Edition (AEPS-2) in child development scoring. In order to harmonize the previous and updated assessment versions for children aged 0-3 across six developmental domains, a common item non-equivalent design, featuring fixed parameter calibration equating (known as \u27anchoring\u27), is utilized within the Rasch framework. A total of 18,411 cases from the AEPS-2 Test Level I and 317 cases from the AEPS-3 Test were utilized to assess scale quality. The psychometric properties of both assessment versions were evaluated using the rating scale Rasch model, revealing a good model-data fit. Two sets of anchor items, selected based on either identical or functional matching methods, were determined using the cosine similarity coefficient and subsequently validated through expert content analysis. These anchor item sets demonstrated acceptable quality. The research then examined the impact of different anchor sets on person parameter estimation during the anchoring process. Ultimately, the study produced person measure and observed score conversion tables between AEPS-2 and AEPS-3. The resulting conversion tables provide valuable insights into the relationship between the old and updated assessment versions. These findings contribute to equating methodology, ECE/ECSE, and education policy. As an early implementation of functional matching anchoring equating in the ECSE field, this study provides a practical model for score equating transformation that can be applied across both early childhood education and special education sectors. In the early childhood education area, it supports the ongoing refinement of assessment tools in early childhood education, helping practitioners make more informed decisions about child development. By leveraging the psychometric model, the research contributes to improving the quality of assessment tools for early childhood education practitioners, leading to better outcomes for children in these critical developmental stages. Another important contribution of this study is that it reflects the assessment requirements in special education and connects education policy with research goals. This ensures that assessments remain consistent, fair, and accurate, enabling educators and specialists to effectively track and support children\u27s development over time, ultimately improving educational equity