Self-initiations in young children with autism during Pivotal Response Treatment with and without robot assistance.
A friendly robot sidekick during PRT can spark more useful self-initiations in preschool and kindergarten clients with autism.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers compared two ways to run Pivotal Response Treatment sessions with preschool and early-elementary autistic children. One group got classic PRT. The other group got PRT plus a small robot that moved and talked during play.
All kids were 3-7 years old with autism. The team counted how often each child started a new interaction on their own during play. They also asked parents about social skills three months later.
What they found
Both groups made more self-initiations, but the robot group jumped higher. Their new starts were more useful too, like asking to play or showing a toy.
Parents of robot-group children later rated their kids as more aware of others. The extra tech seemed to stretch the social gain even after sessions ended.
How this fits with other research
Ventola et al. (2016) already showed that regular PRT lowers repetitive behaviors in the same age range. Wp et al. now add that a robot can push the social side even further.
Kumazaki et al. (2018) found that autistic preschoolers look longer at a robot than at a person. The new study turns that extra attention into real social starts during PRT.
de Korte et al. (2021) moved PRT to older kids, 9-15 years, and still saw medium social gains. Together the papers trace a line: PRT works across ages, and robots give the youngest an extra boost.
Why it matters
If you run early-intervention sessions, try adding a small social robot to your PRT setup. Place it so the child must ask for turns or shared looks. Track how often the child starts a new bid toward you or the robot. You may see bigger functional gains that parents still notice months later.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The initiation of social interaction is often defined as a core deficit of autism spectrum disorder. Optimizing these self-initiations is therefore a key component of Pivotal Response Treatment, an established intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder. However, little is known about the development of self-initiations during intervention and whether this development can be facilitated by robot assistance within Pivotal Response Treatment. The aim of this study was to (1) investigate the effect of Pivotal Response Treatment and robot-assisted Pivotal Response Treatment on self-initiations (functional and social) of young children with autism spectrum disorder over the course of intervention and (2) explore the relation between development in self-initiations and additional gains in general social-communicative skills. Forty-four children with autism spectrum disorder (aged 3-8 years) were included in this study. Self-initiations were assessed during parent-child interaction videos of therapy sessions and coded by raters who did not know which treatment (Pivotal Response Treatment or robot-assisted Pivotal Response Treatment) the child received. General social-communicative skills were assessed before start of the treatment, after 10 and 20 weeks of intervention and 3 months after the treatment was finalized. Results showed that self-initiations increased in both treatment groups, with the largest improvements in functional self-initiations in the group that received robot-assisted Pivotal Response Treatment. Increased self-initiations were related to higher parent-rated social awareness 3 months after finalizing the treatment.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2020 · doi:10.1177/1362361320935006