Related Story Let's Face It: Computer Program Teaches Autistic Children Facial Recognition Skills Senior Faces the Mystery of Autism Innovative Project May Improve Autistic Children’s Abilities by Anne C. Paine December 6, 2002 When psychology major Kim Peters registered for Cognitive Neuropsychology last year, her lack of experience working with children didn’t seem important. Then she learned that the course would involve working with children with autism. "I was terrified!" she said.   Kim Peters and Matthew, a student at the Murray Ridge School, take a break from the Let’s Face It game to read storybook. Part way through the book, Matthew jumps up to hug Kim. The hands-on course forced the shy and somewhat quiet junior to jump in with both feet. She landed running and hasn’t stopped since. Now a senior, Peters has continued her work with Associate Professor James Tanaka, the course instructor, and is aiming for an honors project on autism. She is considering a medical career in psychiatry or research. The Autism Project—the hands-on component of the class—is part of an ongoing project at Oberlin, the Yale Child Study Center, and the Delaware Autism Project and is supported by grants from the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Not surprisingly, the course and the project dovetail nicely with Tanaka’s own research interest: understanding the visual processes underlying humans’ ability to recognize faces. Initially trained in special education, Tanaka said he became a cognitive psychologist when he realized he was more interested in discovering ways to help children learn than in teaching itself. Central to the Autism Project is a computer game, "Let’s Face It," devised to help children with autism learn to recognize faces and emotions. "Kids with autism have a lot of social deficits," Peters explained. "They have problems attending to faces over other objects, meaning, for instance, when they enter a room, they don’t automatically look at faces. They also don’t sustain eye contact or show emotional affect. Some researchers believe they don’t have a theory of mind, which means they don’t understand what others are thinking and feeling." The premise of the Autism Project is that with early intervention, these children can be taught to overcome some of these deficits. Tanaka devised the computer game last fall with two students—Brendan Mislan ’02, who now works at Microsoft, and Angela Lo, who did the art for the program. Students from his Cognitive Neuropsychology class worked as "face tutors" and field-tested the game last spring with four children at a local school for children with mental retardation and developmental disabilities. This sheet from the Let’s Face It game has been completed by a student.   Each child was assigned four face tutors, and each tutor worked one day a week with the child, giving four individualized approaches to the same lesson. "This forced the children to generalize the skills across different people," Tanaka said. Let’s Face It has three distinct sections, each with a different goal. The first section helps students distinguish faces from among other objects. The game uses pictures of landscapes with faces and objects hidden throughout, "kind of like the hidden-picture games kids like," Peters said. In the second section, "we teach them the concept of identity, that not all faces are the same. Then we help them decode information in faces—what happy looks like, for example, and have them try to make the facial expressions themselves," Peters said. The third section is more complicated. "This one works a lot with the theory of mind," Peters explained. "We present a social situation to the student—Johnny dropped his ice-cream cone—and talk about how Johnny would feel and react." The game tracks each child’s progress, and Tanaka, Peters, and another student spent the summer analyzing results and fine-tuning the curriculum. The initial data looks promising, and plans call for expanding the project to include a larger number of children at the Yale Child Study Center. There, the researchers will be able to use brain scans to quantify and confirm results. Meanwhile, all the face tutors who returned to Oberlin this fall are on the job again. "I didn’t know much about autism when I started this project," Peters said. "Most the face tutors say that working on the project is the highlight of their week. The connection we make with each of the kids is very rewarding." "The number of students interested in this project was much greater than I anticipated," Tanaka said. "For many Oberlin students, there is a real commitment to doing social good. And from a theoretical standpoint, autism is a very interesting thing. This project involves both pure and applied research. That’s something that rarely happens in science."