In a spring article in the UAB Magazine, Dr. Biasini talked about the benefits of computer based interventions like FaceSay, and the encouraging gains seen in the study.
"Also, the computer tasks performed by children in the study were brief in comparison to the time that might have been spent in social groups to achieve the same gains—we saw benefits that might have taken months to achieve in social groups."
-- UAB Magazine, Spring 2008
I hope FaceSay can be used as an "amplifier"/"accellerator" for group and person to person social work of every sort. For example, I would bet - er, my hypothesis is - that the Gazing excercises in ABA, the "Thinking with the Eyes" sessions in Michele Garcia Winner's "Social Thinking" program and many others might see larger and/or faster gains when done in conjunction w/ FaceSay.
Add Comment A nice interview w/ the UAB researchers, Dr. Biasini and Dr. Hopkins, and one of the study participants, 11 yo MaryLeigh Wear, is airing on some local TV stations. It's great to see how tickled she is with the silly games :-). They omitted her best quote, though. The interviewer asked, "What did you learn from playing FaceSay?". MaryLeigh replied, "I learned I need to look at both halves of the face. I've been looking at just the bottom half." Dec. 2007- UAB completed a randomized controlled trial w/ over 80 4yo Neurotypical preschoolers using two of the FaceSay games - "Amazing Gazing" and "Bandaid" Clinic - as the Intervention. The kids loved the games and saw gains in Face Recognition Skills, but not Emotion Recognition (the facial expression matching game was not part of the study). Generalization was not measured. Trista Perez, the Primary Investigator, successfully defended her Master's thesis related to the study. The University of Alabama Birmingham announced encouraging results of their randomized controlled trial with 49 autistic children. Read the Press Release. |
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