Using stop-motion video as visual indicator to strength children with ASD's attention focus on specific nonverbal social cues to enhance perception judgments and situational awareness

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by a reduced ability to understand the emotional expressions on other people's faces. Increasing evidence indicates that children with ASD might not recognize or understand crucial nonverbal behaviors, which likely causes them to ignore nonverbal social cues, like facial expressions, that usually aid social interaction. In this study, we create a Stop-Motion Video (SMV) material for children with ASD that will catch their attention by signaling through body gesture movements and facial expressions. The participants will draw these social cues into a storyboard in which the therapist can be able to deduce patterns of judgment and awareness of the situation. This strategy provides a specific elements in a video clip let the autism can find and compare same images occur in the dynamic videos; thus, it can be used to help children with ASD increase and drive their attention toward the meaning and emotional value of facial expressions in specific social situations. The study was carried out according to multiple baseline design across participants. After five weeks of training intervention, all 4 participants' scores rose significantly and dramatically during the intervention phase, and remained significantly higher in the maintenance phase than at baseline. The results showed that SMV strategy moderately effective in teaching the children with ASD to focus on target social signals.