FaceSay uses an interactive approach with computer animated avatars, both humans and animals, to create a life-like program to teach face and emotion recognition skills. It incorporates activities to address known challenges for persons with ASD – for example, in the first of the three games the goal was to improve joint attention skills by creating an interactive problem solving task focused on tracking the eyes of the avatar to respond to the avatars requests. It is a colourful program that contains three different games to teach children specific social skills:
- Amazing gazing – teach children to attend to eye gaze, respond to joint attention, and understand that eye gaze can convey intent. Avatar is surrounded by objects, numbers or faces, and the child must touch where the avatar is gazing
- Band Aid Clinic – designed to teach holistic facial processing and face recognition. Child is asked to select appropriate face “band aid” that would fit over the distorted portion of the avatar’s face. The possible matches increase in number and similarity as the games progress. The face comes alive once reconstructed and expresses gratitude for fixing the face
- Follow the Leader – designed to teach children to attend to movements in the area around the eyes to improve their ability to discriminate facial expressions
It teaches emotional skills, social interaction skills, and facial recognition skills. Hopkins and colleagues (2011) found that providing children with ASD opportunities to practice eye gaze, expression matching, and face recognition in FaceSay improved their social skill. High-functioning children with ASD demonstrated improvements in all three areas of the intervention: facial recognition, emotion recognition, and social interaction in natural environments. It is still unclear how the length of the treatment is related to effectiveness. Due to lack of rigour in data collection and blinding, this study received a strength rating of 1.
Download Face Say (Requires computer)