Welcome back to Reading the Research! Each week I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects to share with you. Along the way I discuss the findings with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today’s article describes a non-invasive form of attention training that looks promising for helping autistic people manage ourselves better and get higher grades in school. This wouldn’t be the first study to delve into autistic attention patterns. Their secret weapon to make it interesting? Video games.
I’m always a bit skeptical when I see the headline, “this new treatment will help autistic people!” You immediately have to ask a lot of questions. For example, “what exactly is this treatment targeting?” “Who benefits most from this?” And unfortunately, that always-relevant question: “where’s the money going?”
In many forms of ABA, the answers are “the autistic person’s autistic features,” “everyone around the autistic person at the autistic person’s expense,” and “insurance companies and clinic centers, in sums you could buy a car for.” Needless to say, this isn’t okay.
This article’s attention training, though? For the moment, the answers look like “the autistic person’s ability to focus,” “everyone, including the autistic person, at least academically,” and, because this is an experimental treatment, “research-focused universities, if any money at all is involved.” Relatively speaking, those are pretty good answers.
It’ll be worth watching to see if the makers of these attention training video games sell them in any form. Because they’re fairly simple games, it wouldn’t be difficult to include them in a school therapeutic setting. Most schools in the US have computers at this point. So purchasing the video games and having them available wouldn’t be difficult. Apparently some form of this is already going on in Europe and the Middle East. But it hasn’t made its way to the US just yet.
Video Games as Training and Assessment
Personally, I would already argue that video games can teach coping, organizational, and pattern-recognition skills. And they’re a known quantity to a lot of autistic people. Saying “here, play this video game” isn’t particularly intimidating. Unlike saying, “here, take this psychological assessment.” Or “here, talk to this new person about all the difficulties you’re having in school.”
Heck, that same kind of switcheroo was pulled on me recently. I applied for a job at UPS recently. At present, they aren’t doing traditional interviews. Instead, they’ve hired another company to do their hiring processes. It was basically automated. I entered most of my personal information. Then they sent me to a different website to “play some games that will tell us about you.” You play the “games” on a smart device or a computer.
I have a Bachelor’s degree in psychology and at least three functioning brain cells. I knew they were going to run psychological tests, and they did. Including some pretty basic, obvious ones that involve sharing money to test how generous and pro-social you are. In some cases they even told you what your results meant, broadly speaking.
The “games” verified that I am a team player, am not horribly selfish, vengeful, risk-prone or -averse, or egotistical, and possess basic information processing skills. So then I entered my remaining information and chose a start date. Theoretically that would have transitioned me right into their intro training. In practicality the hiring processes and the people with boots on the ground weren’t communicating very well. But I did end up starting the job properly with only a little extra delay.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter! There are links and comments on studies that were interesting, but didn’t get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
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