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Affective Social Quest 139

parents were surprised at this boy’s quick adaptation to the doll interface and
his ability to recognize the emotions.
As suspected, higher functioning and older children, age 6-9, demonstrated
ease with understanding the doll interaction, exhibited pleasure with the gam-
ing aspect, and needed few of the helpful screen cues to make their selection.
They were able to match emotional expressions displayed on their screen by
selecting the correct doll after only a few sessions. One boy mimicked the
displayed emotions on the screen. His mother reported that he was able to
recognize other people’s emotional expressions at home also.
We observed in some sessions that the child and a parent would each hold a
doll, and when the parent was holding the doll that the child needed to select,
the child would turn to the parent to achieve the selection; thus, the physical
nature of the interface actually aided in helping the child with eye contact and
shared experiences referred to as joint attention, another area where autistics
often need help. Thus, we continue to see promise in the playful doll interface,
despite occasional reliability problems with their sensors.

Figure 16.4. Recognition results for six kids (note some of the vertical scales differ.)

4. Conclusions
ASQ was successful at engaging the children. Furthermore, the statistical
findings suggest that emotion matching occurred in most cases, with some chil-
dren showing improvements in their performance over three sessions. Figure
16.4 shows combined recognition results for the six kids - where higher curves
indicate better recognition rates. For example, when an angry clip was played,
all kids (except subject 4) were able to correctly pick the angry doll when given
two attempts. Subject 4 took many more tries than necessary to select the an-