Can cartoon characters help children with ASD?
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Can cartoon characters help children with ASD?
The relationship between Disney cartoon characters and children with ASD is a media favourite. Articles in the New York Times, Guardian, Times, and Telegraph newspapers accompanied releases of “Life Animated”, a book written by journalist Ron Suskind describing how his relationship with his son developed via Disney characters.
When trying to answer general questions - especially if, like us, you are focused on scientific and statistical evidence - it’s easy to get lost in a dry abstract world of numbers and “effect sizes”. A book like “Life, Animated” is a useful corrective, providing an honest and heartfelt account of a man’s relationship with his son.
However there’s an equal opposite mistake, where we read an account like Ron Suskind’s and generalise one moving and eloquent description of a relationship to all children presenting with ASD. So somehow, we have to try to navigate between these extremes.
As we do that, there’s a place for intuition and personal experience. Anecdotally, a deep fascination with Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends seems common for children with ASD. So maybe the idea that cartoon characters can help isn’t so crazy. However, is there any scientific evidence to back this up, beyond intuition and anecdote?
The UK government thought so. In 2007 David Lammy, then the UK’s Culture Minister, launched the Transporters DVD. This featured real human faces grafted onto animated vehicles and was designed to help children with ASD. In fifteen 5 minute cartoons, eight characters help children recognise human emotions. Each episode is followed by an interactive quiz.
This approach was based on Empathising-Systematising theory. This is the idea that children with ASD are more adept at “systemizing” skills vs “empathising” ones. Theoretically, animated trains, moving in a systematic way, should hold a child’s attention, while the attached human face could teach them emotion recognition. A study confirmed that children with ASD who watched the DVD every day for 4 weeks showed better emotion recognition and vocabulary than their peers who didn’t.
So the evidence says cartoon characters can help?
Well, not so fast. A follow up study compared children with ASD who watched the Transporters DVD with another group who watched a Thomas the Tank Engine cartoon. In both cases the children watched the DVD with a parent, and in both cases the child’s social behaviours improved. However only those who watched the Transporters DVD showed an improvement in emotion recognition. So according to this second study, the DVD was doing what it was supposed to be doing, teaching emotion recognition, but that wasn’t the thing that was improving the child’s social behaviour.
So what was? Well - back to our intuition - the involvement of the parents suggests that there’s more going on than just the cartoon DVDs. Another study compared the interactions of children with ASD with: (1) a human therapist, (2) an animated interactive character controlled by a human, (3) a human actor, and (4) with a pre-recorded cartoon character who sought social responses. In all four cases, the attention of the child was held about equally. However the child responded more to the therapist, with both more gestures and words. The child responded least to the pre-recorded cartoon. The response to the human actor and the animated interactive character was about the same, in-between the therapist and the pre-recorded cartoon.
So it looks like cartoons will hold the child’s attention. However unsurprisingly, the child’s responses depend on what those characters are doing. In other words, cartoon characters by themselves aren’t a magic solution – thought has to be given to what actions those characters are doing.
One underlying idea behind this work is that children with ASD are less good at recognising emotions using the implicit, subconscious methods that neurotypical children use. However with their instinct to systematise, children presenting with ASD can develop atypical explicit strategies to recognise emotions. This is the suggested explanation for a study that showed that children presenting with ASD are actually better at recognising the emotions in still cartoon faces than their neurotypical peers. In contrast, they were worse when recognising emotions photographs or films, and about the same for animated cartoons.
One valid concern might be that a lot of these studies are on populations that are WEIRD, i.e. white, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic and therefore might not generalise. One study addressed at least the W&D criticisms, comparing Chinese children presenting with ASD who used the Transporters DVD to those who didn’t. It found, as with Western children, an increase in emotion recognition and emotional vocabulary in the children who used the DVD.
So where does this all leave us? On the one hand the science seems to say that cartoons do hold the attention of children presenting with ASD – a result that seems to hold across cultures. On the other hand, holding attention isn’t that useful by itself! Thought has to be given to the context in which the cartoon characters are presented, what lesson they are trying to get across and why. And it’s here that the intuition and experience come into their own.
Further reading
Reviews of Ron Suskind’s book are available here. The launch of the Transporters DVD was announced here. The original study supporting the use of the Transporters DVD is here, though there have been many others since. One of those studies with more nuanced results is here. More on the interactions of children with ASD and avatars is available here. Children with ASD can outperform neurotypical peers in emotion recognition of cartoon characters here. Finally you can see the study with Chinese children here.