Virtual Reality Immersion Rescales Regulation of Interpersonal Distance in Controls but not in Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Autistic adults consistently prefer greater personal space than neurotypical peers—even in VR—so build that room into your environment.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Simões et al. (2020) placed autistic and neurotypical adults inside a virtual-reality room. Each person walked toward a life-size avatar and stopped when the distance felt "comfortable."
The team repeated the test with different avatar sizes and distances. They also gave everyone a short survey about autism traits.
What they found
Autistic adults kept a greater interpersonal distance from the avatar than neurotypical adults. The more autism traits a person reported, the larger the distance they chose.
Even when the avatar grew or shrank, the autistic group kept the same extra space. Controls moved closer to small avatars and farther from large ones.
How this fits with other research
Prior research on social spacing in preschoolers has found a similar social gap using brain scans. Those findings show weaker brain-to-brain sync during joint play in autistic children. The age difference explains why the two lines of research do not clash—both point to early and lifelong social spacing differences.
Alcañiz et al. (2022) used a VR paradigm to track eye gaze, and their machine-learning model distinguished autistic from typical children with high accuracy. Marco's distance measure adds a second, easy-to-capture VR marker for assessment.
Cheng et al. (2012) showed that VR can teach joint-attention skills to children with PDD. Marco's work extends this by showing VR can also measure social spacing in adults, not just train kids.
Why it matters
You now have evidence that autistic adults consistently prefer more personal space than neurotypical peers. Use this during intake to set up quieter corners, wider hallways, or assigned seats that give clients extra personal space. Plan for at least an extra arm's length when guiding groups or lining up for transitions—your clients will feel safer and meltdowns may drop.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Social interactions are often shaped by the space we prefer to maintain between us and others, that is, interpersonal distance. Being too distant or too close to a stranger can often be perceived as odd, and lead to atypical social interactions. This calibration of appropriate interpersonal distance thus constitutes an important social skill. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD, hereafter autism) often experience difficulties with this skill, and anecdotal accounts suggest atypical interpersonal distances in their social interactions. In the current study, we systematically measured interpersonal distance in individuals with autism using immersive virtual reality (IVR) to recreate a naturalistic interaction with a full body avatar of a similar age. Participants observed their own virtual body in first-person perspective, and the other avatar in two tasks: in the first task, they approached the other avatar (active), in the second one they were approached by the other avatar (passive). Two groups of neurotypical and autistic adults, performed both tasks. Autistic adults showed greater interpersonal distance when compared to non-autistic adults. Additionally, the difference between the passive and active conditions was smaller for non-autistic compared to autistic adults. Across the full sample, greater interpersonal distance was associated with higher autism-related traits. This study provides systematic evidence for greater interpersonal distance in autistic adults using a paradigm with high ecological validity and can be useful in informing the design of appropriate environmental adjustments for shared spaces.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2020 · doi:10.1007/s10803-020-04484-6