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by Sue Kropp
Related Links:
Jim
Tanaka's Homepage
VizCog
Lab
Yale
Child Study Center
Hegg helps Bobby play the computer game"Let's Face It."
JULY 3 , 2002--When you enter a room, are you able to identify the people present? Chances are, you instantly recognize the familiar faces of friends and family members without conscious effort. Children with autism, however, have difficulty identifying individuals through facial recognition, which often causes problems with their social development.
"The part of the brain that controls facial recognition does not seem to work in children with autism," says Jim Tanaka, associate professor of psychology. "I'm curious to find out if this area can be activated after an intensive intervention program, and if the children can be taught to recognize faces."
Tanaka's interest in this question is part of an ongoing research project at Oberlin College, the Yale Child Study Center, and the Delaware Autism Program. The study, supported by grants from the James S. McDonnell Foundation and National Science Foundation, is testing the theory that a computer-based software program for young children with autism can normalize function in the area of the brain that controls facial recognition, the fusiform gyrus.
Last summer, Tanaka worked with two of his former students, Brendan Mislin '01 and Angela Lo '02, to create the prototype for this software program. The program, "Let's Face It," uses different games to teach autistic children how to recognize facial expressions, develop distinctions between faces and objects, and assign labels to various facial expressions. Sensory feedback-- music, variable-toned vocalizations, spinning object, and special effects--are incorporated into the program to encourage users to test themselves against games of increasing difficulty.
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to right: Bobby Bullock, Logan Hegg '04, Kim Peters '03, and Jim Tanaka |
During the past semester, Logan Hegg '04 and Kim Peters '03 were part of a group of "face tutors" in Tanaka's lab in cognitive neuropsychology that visited a local center for mentally and physically handicapped children once a week to work with the center's autistic children.
"During class time, we developed individual lesson plans for each of our students," Hegg says. Peters adds: "We developed different games for each child as the weeks went on. The student I worked with was adept at the computer program and enjoyed reading with me, but we also did lots of mirror work and interactive one-on-one activities to increase his facial recognition skills."
"The parents and teachers of the children in our study have reported that the children are showing more awareness of facial expressions," says Tanaka. "However, we don't yet have the science to prove the program's efficacy."
Tanaka and his students are putting science to the test this summer as they analyze the mountains of data that has been collected by the students in his past classes.
In the next stage of the project, researchers at the Yale Child Study Center will test Tanaka's computer program with a larger sampling of children.
"The Yale Child Study Center has the equipment to take brain scans," Tanaka says. "In the future, we plan to take pre-training brain scans of the children in the study. After they receive six months of intensive tutoring, we'll take post-intervention scans to see if the program has activated the brain region we think it will activate."
Tanaka and his colleagues hope to prove that exposing autistic children to an intensive intervention program early in life can normalize brain activity and improve social interaction skills.
"If the data pans out, it will be relatively inexpensive to disseminate this software to families and schools," says Tanaka.
Please send comments, questions, and suggestions about Oberlin Online news and feature articles to online.news@oberlin.edu.
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