Animation helps children with autism

Children with autism tend to avoid looking at human faces and find it hard to understand the facial features that relate to emotions. The Transporters DVD helps children with autism to look at the human face and learn about emotions.

Through a series of 15 five-minute episodes, eight loveable vehicles with human faces help children to recognise different human emotions followed by an interactive quiz. The series is narrated by Stephen Fry.

The novelty of this approach is that children with autism are strongly attracted to mechanical vehicles that are highly predictable, and for the first time real human faces have been ‘grafted’ onto animated vehicles. In this way, whilst watching the mechanical vehicles (trains, trams, cable cars, tractors), children are also looking at faces.

The DVD was launched by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre (ARC) at the University of Cambridge, and David Lammy, Culture Minister. Commissioned by Culture Online, part of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and produced by Catalyst Pictures it features the latest research by the ARC.

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen commented, “Just as a child with dyslexia can be helped significantly by using tailored educational methods to ease them into reading words, so a child with autism can be helped significantly by using tailored educational methods to ease them into reading faces.”

Research by Dr Ofer Golan and Professor Simon Baron-Cohen at the ARC found that following a four-week period of watching the DVD for 15 minutes a day, children with high spectrum autism performed as well as typically developing children of the same age in emotion recognition tasks.

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen added, “The Transporters aims to teach not just some basic emotions (happy, sad, angry, disgust, fear, surprise) but also some more complex ones (ashamed, joking, jealous, proud, tired, sorry, kind, excited, worried, unfriendly, and grumpy). The aim is that through hours of repetitive TV watching, children with autism, instead of turning away from faces as they usually do because they are so unpredictable, thus missing out on crucial experience in learning about emotional expressions, will tune into faces without even realizing they are doing so. This is children’s TV tailor made to be autism-friendly”

40,000 DVDs are being distributed for free to families with a child on the autistic spectrum, or to teachers/carers of such children. Visit www.transporters.tv to order a copy.