British DVD Takes Aim At Autism
Cartoons Focus on Facial Expressions
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Happy, worried, surprised, ashamed: Children with autism can find it difficult to discern from facial expressions how another person is feeling. A team of researchers at Britain's Cambridge University has created an animated DVD called "The Transporters" to help children with autism learn this important social skill.
"Very rule-based kids with autism get fascinated by patterns and get a lot of pleasure from repetition," said psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of Cambridge's Autism Research Centre. They often enjoy vehicles, particularly those that move predictably along tracks, such as cable cars and trains.
"The Transporters" are eight cartoon vehicles with human faces.
"As they're watching the mechanical aspects, without realizing it they would be exposed to faces to learn about emotions," says Baron-Cohen.
The DVD features 15 episodes with quizzes at the end. Each episode focuses on a few emotions, starting with such basics as happiness, sadness and anger.
In the first episode, William the ferry beams as he takes his friend Charlie across the harbor. The narrator says, "William was happy," and the camera repeatedly shows William's smiling face. Later episodes deal with more complex emotions, such as jealousy, when Oliver the funicular railway envies Jennie the tram, who gets to stop at traffic lights.
The U.K. government gave Baron-Cohen and his team a grant to produce the DVD (available at http:/
The Autism Centre performed a one-month evaluation of the efficacy of "The Transporters." Seventeen children with autism and Asperger syndrome were encouraged to watch the DVD for 15 minutes every day. The children's ability to recognize emotions improved significantly over a group of 17 children with autism who did not watch the video. Some had even caught up to the ability levels expected of non-autistic children of the same age.
Baron-Cohen says he has also received lots of positive e-mails from parents, which he found reassuring.
"Our biggest fear was we would develop something that children would hate," he said.
-- Rachel Saslow
