An inclusive video game that reveals how people with autism perceive the world and learn could help in the search for new therapies.
A new video game created with people with autism in mind allows us to better understand the perceptive difficulties of those affected by autism spectrum disorders, and to develop better support strategies.
The video game, created by researchers at Boston University, directly measures how people with autism interpret information, rather than simply relying on their caregivers’ reports. The approach also manages to include those affected by severe and non-verbal forms of autism, who are often excluded from the research because they are unable to understand the requests or complete the assigned tasks.
Researchers led by Benjamin Scott, director of the Laboratory of Comparative Cognition at the US university, hope that the video game will allow us to better understand the functioning of the brain with autism and perfect new drugs and therapies to improve the daily lives of those affected.
Through the game, the research group also identified a possible cause of some perceptual deficits linked to autism, which was described in an article on Science Advances.
Hunt for the gem. And the rules are learned by playing
The mission proposed by the video game is a hunt for gems. Players choose a character and then move around a map to collect as many treasures as possible.
As you gradually orient yourself in this scenario, you understand that some flashes of light on the screen indicate the areas where the gems are present in greater numbers, but this rule is not declared: the players start playing and learn the game conditions as they proceed. This is an essential prerequisite so that the activity can also be performed by people with severe forms of autism, who would have difficulty managing the communication of the rules.
Decisions and learning: what the game measures
The game was tested on over 300 adolescents aged 11 to 17, around 200 of whom had autism; the other participants were their brothers and sisters. The scenario allowed us to evaluate how the children made decisions, how they managed sensory stimuli and how they learned methods of action. Most players, including those with severe autism, quickly learned the rules and adapted to increasing levels of difficulty. However, the process of learning the rules was influenced by the presence or absence of autism spectrum disorders.
In fact, those suffering from autism had more difficulty using all the sensory information provided in the game to collect as many gems as possible; he took longer to learn to play and was less accurate in “chasing” than people without autism.
The reason could be Also in what the researchers, in the new paper, describe as “perceptual integration deficit,” the accumulation of “noise” and distortion linked to each new piece of information which, when more sensory information is added, leads to difficulties in understanding routine forms of communication.
“One of the consolidated ideas in the field of autism is that there is an alteration in the excitatory-inhibitory balance of neural circuits and that this alteration can lead to modified neural activity, capable of producing a distorted perception” explains Scott. In everyday life, this could translate into a difficulty in integrating the message of the words and then of the sentences communicated by the interlocutor with the visual clues that he is providing.
In the future, the game could be refined to evaluate the effectiveness of autism drugs or therapies being tested and whether they offered some form of communication improvement. But, precisely because it does not require the assignment of rules and is easily playable, the video game could also be used to understand if and how the results obtained in animal studies on autism (for example those on the brain circuits implicated in this disorder) are transferred to humans.
