‘‘Children with autism and Asperger syndrome love order and predictability. So they shy away from people. To them, we’re confusing and unpredictable,’’ he said.
Autism is a development disorder characterised by impaired social interaction and communication skills, which can impact on academic performance.
‘‘Often these children are not very motivated to learn, so part of the problem in the past has been how do you persuade a child to take part in social skills training,’’ Professor Baron-Cohen said.
But the animated series, which is aimed at two- to eight-year-olds and uses objects children with autism enjoy, appears to work.
Children with autism who participated in the study, aged four to seven, caught up with other children in their ability to recognise emotions - a skill present from at least 10 weeks of age in typically developing infants.
Visiting Sydney this week, Professor Baron-Cohen said the goal of the project was to teach autistic children to recognise ‘‘real emotions on real people’‘, so real-life faces of actors were used in the The Transporters series instead of animated cartoon faces.
‘‘We want to use the animated vehicle as a bridge into our world but in order to do that we have to join their predictable world,’’ he said. ‘‘This was a way to meet them half way.’‘
The eight characters created for the series are part of a toy set in a boy’s bedroom and include trams, cable cars, a funicular railway and a chain ferry. The toys move in a predictable, repetitive path restricted to the tracks or cables they move on.
‘’[This] allows affective information that would otherwise be confusing to become more intelligible and appealing to the autistic mind,’’ the study concluded.
