Abstract concept and imagination teaching through virtual reality in people with autism spectrum disorders

Virtual Reality (VR) has been claimed to provide a particularly facilitatory environment for people with Autistic Spectrum Disorders in that it also offers structure, opportunities for repetition, affective engagement and, additionally, control of the learning environment. Virtual reality shares the advantages of computer-based learning, and has the additional advantage of making it more likely that the results will generalise to real-word settings in that it is a simulation of them. For imagination training, VR offers its exclusive advantage of making it possible to explicitly show magic transformations of how an object can act as if it were a different one, which is useful for training in both abstract concepts and imagination understanding. This short paper reviews the relevant issues that shall be addressed when designing and experimentally assessing a tool for this purpose, and concludes with the results of the more relevant research outcomes obtained in this field and which are published in international peer-reviewed scientific journals on autism.