Virtual Reality Training of Social Skills in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Examination of Acceptability, Usability, User Experience, Social Skills, and Executive Functions.

Poor social skills in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are associated with reduced independence in daily life. Current interventions for improving the social skills of individuals with ASD fail to represent the complexity of real-life social settings and situations. Virtual reality (VR) may facilitate social skills training in social environments and situations similar to those in real life; however, more research is needed to elucidate aspects such as the acceptability, usability, and user experience of VR systems in ASD. Twenty-five participants with ASD attended a neuropsychological evaluation and three sessions of VR social skills training, which incorporated five social scenarios with three difficulty levels. Participants reported high acceptability, system usability, and user experience. Significant correlations were observed between performance in social scenarios, self-reports, and executive functions. Working memory and planning ability were significant predictors of the functionality level in ASD and the VR system's perceived usability, respectively. Yet, performance in social scenarios was the best predictor of usability, acceptability, and functionality level. Planning ability substantially predicted performance in social scenarios, suggesting an implication in social skills. Immersive VR social skills training in individuals with ASD appears to be an appropriate service, but an errorless approach that is adaptive to the individual's needs should be preferred.

EF Train: development of an executive function training program for preschool and school-aged children with ADHD

Executive functions are involved in the manifestation of ADHD symptoms. These functions have been proven to predict academic achievement and performance promoting school readiness and social functioning, thus training programs are essential. The current study focused on the development of an executive function training program "EF Train" and assessed its effect on the enhancement of three core executive functions, i.e. working memory, inhibitory control and sustained attention. A group of 52 children with ADHD ranging from 4 to 7 years of age were assigned to either a training group who performed 20 sessions of the executive function training program or a control group that received no training. The assessment of executive function improvement was carried out before, immediately after and three months after the completion of the "EF Train". Data analysis revealed that the training program led to significant improvements of the core executive functions, as well as diminished ADHD symptoms. The findings indicate that executive function programs may assist on the attenuation of ADHD symptomatology providing additional non-invasive approaches for executive function improvement

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Auditory temporal processing and dyslexia in an orthographically consistent language.

We examined two hypotheses relating auditory processing to dyslexia in Greek, an orthographically consistent language. Study I examined the "P-center" or "beat detection" hypothesis (Goswami et al., 2002) in a sample of Grade 6 dyslexics, Grade 6 chronological age (CA) controls, and Grade 4 reading age (RA) controls. Study II examined the "temporal processing," or "rapid auditory processing" hypothesis (Tallal, 1980) in a sample of Grade 7 dyslexics, CA controls, and in two groups of CA matched children with low frequency discrimination or low tone sequencing performance. Both studies indicate that (a) as a group, dyslexic children did not perform significantly worse on auditory processing measures than the control groups; (b) measures of auditory processing mostly did not account for unique amount of variance in phonological processing, reading, or spelling; and (c) at an individual level of analysis, some of the dyslexic children experienced auditory temporal processing deficits. Implications on the importance of auditory processing in reading in orthographically consistent languages are discussed.

Traditional and computer-based screening and diagnosis of reading disabilities in Greek.

In this study, we examined the characteristics of reading disability (RD) in the seventh grade of the Greek educational system and the corresponding diagnostic practice. We presented a clinically administered assessment battery, composed of typically employed tasks, and a fully automated, computer-based assessment battery that evaluates some of the same constructs. In all, 261 children ages 12 to 14 were tested. The results of the traditional assessment indicated that RD concerns primarily slow reading and secondarily poor reading and spelling accuracy. This pattern was matched in the domains most attended to in expert student evaluation. Automatic (computer-based) screening for RD in the target age range matched expert judgment in validity and reliability in the absence of a full clinical evaluation. It is proposed that the educational needs of the middle and high school population in Greece will be best served by concentrating on reading and spelling performance--particularly fluency--employing widespread computer-based screening to partially make up for expert-personnel shortage.

Reading ability is negatively related to Stroop interference.

Stroop interference is often taken as evidence for reading automaticity even though young and poor readers, who presumably lack reading automaticity, present strong interference. Here the relationship between reading skills and Stroop interference was studied in a 7th-grade sample. Greater interference was observed in children diagnosed with reading disability (dyslexia) than in unimpaired children. Moreover, poorer reading skills were found to correlate with greater Stroop interference in the general school population. In correlation and regression analyses, interference was primarily associated with reading speed, with an additional unique contribution of reading accuracy. Color naming errors were few and not comparably related to reading skills. The relation of reading skill to Stroop interference was examined in computational modeling simulations. The production model of Roelofs [Roelofs, A. (2003). Goal-referenced selection of verbal action: modeling attentional control in the Stroop task. Psychological Review, 110, 88-125], in which interference is primarily due to word stimuli having direct access to word form encoding whereas color naming must pass through concept activation and lemma selection, was found to account well for the human data after imposing covariation constraints on parameters controlling word processing and blocking latency, in modifications not affecting the model's previous fit to other data. The connectionist model of Cohen, Dunbar, and McClelland [Cohen, J. D., Dunbar, K., & McClelland, J. L. (1990). On the control of automatic processes: a parallel distributed processing account of the Stroop effect. Psychological Review, 97, 332-361], in which interference is caused by differential route strength, implementing an automaticity account, approximated the observed patterns with network-wide parameter manipulations not specific to reading, such as processing speed and response threshold, likely to affect previously optimized performance. On the basis of the empirical and modeling data we argue for a direct link between reading skill and interference, beyond the effects of executive functioning.