Efficacy of Collaborative Virtual Environment Intervention Programs in Emotion Expression of Children with Autism

Exploratory empirical studies on Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) were conducted to determine if children with autism could make basic emotional recognition effectively, with the use of CVEs as assistive technology. In this paper we report the results of electro-physiological study of two groups of autistic children after an intervention program with and without using Collaborative Virtual Environment. The group trained with CVE showed better results compared to the group trained without Collaborative virtual Environment. There is an emphasized early emotion expression positivity component at around 120 ms latency for CVE trained group which clearly distinguishes the CVE untrained group. Also there are differences observed in Event Related Potential component at about 170 ms latency after the stimulus. Results indicate that the Collaborative Virtual Environments are effective in training Autistic children.