Towards understanding causality – a retrospective study of using explanations in interactions between a humanoid robot and autistic children

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often struggle with visual perspective taking (VPT) skills and the understanding that others might have viewpoints and perspectives that are different from their own; i.e., the ability to understand that two or more people looking at the same object from different positions might not see the same thing. The understanding of VPT can be improved by introducing explicit causal explanations in the interactions involving autistic children. Moreover, the use of social robots can help autistic children improve their social skills. We present a retrospective study with Kaspar, a humanoid social robot specifically designed to interact with children with ASD, which aims to define the initial protocol for a study on the effect of causal explanation in VPT provided by Kaspar. To this end, we investigate in which scenarios causal explanations, provided either by researchers or by Kaspar, contribute substantially to the child’s understanding of VPT. The results have helped us identify multiple interaction categories that benefit from causal explanation. We have used these results in order to define new interaction games that benefit from causal explanations. These are now progressing through usability assessment experiments.