Intervención con realidad virtual inmersiva y arteterapia en personas con trastorno del espectro autista (TEA) para el desarrollo de habilidades comunicativas y resolución de problemas

Resum

This Thesis lies in between two complex challenges in the current education system: on the one hand, the correct attention to diversity, sustaining the pedagogical principles of the so-called Special Education, and, on the other hand, the adequate integration and exploitation of the didactic potential provided by new technological visual resources and the use of Art as an education tool. In the last years we saw an increase in the prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in all education levels. This implies a larger visibility and social concern on this heterogeneous group, but also increases the requirements to fulfill their educational needs. At the same time, the new technologies of information and communication appear as a powerful didactical tool whose optimal exploitation requires a vast analysis of adaptation strategies to the needs of the students, with the additional difficulty associated to the non-stop and frantic evolution of these strategies in the last years. This progress, nonetheless, gave rise to the popularization and democratization of technologies as Immersive Virtual Reality, providing with the opportunity of analyzing its use as an education resource for a collective as the ASD, with a clear preference for the visual learning. On top of that, the use of art and creativity as an education tool permits to generate socialization environments and enhance introspection, self-concern and communication, capabilities framed in the special needs for ASD students. In this vein, this Thesis addresses a twofold intervention for high functioning ASD children. On the one hand, using Virtual Reality, and on the other hand, using Art Therapy, with the objective of testing the educational possibilities, adaptation to their cognitive manner and learning effectivity in different fields where the ASD children have special needs. After an exhaustive literature review, the rest of the Thesis is devoted to the interventions. We selected three groups study, with 7 high functioning ASD children each, with ages between 8 and 15, and similar educational capabilities. In the first group, we use an own intervention design working on social and emotional competences along 10 sessions by using Immersive Virtual Reality as a didactical tool, re-creating virtual environments of socialization (a classroom, a play garden). In the second group, also during 10 sessions, we use an intervention where art is the main education tool, also working on social and emotional competences. The third group is used as control, and as such is not put through any sort of intervention during the period. To estimate the progress of the different groups, a general questionnaire on performance is filled by therapists, family members and the researcher, both before and after the intervention. This allows us to evaluate the progress in the different domains for each group as well as to compare the progress across the different groups. We perform a double evaluation: the traditional one, by assigning scores to the different levels of performance, and a novel one, statistically based. Both evaluations are consistent in suggesting a positive impact in the selected competences both in the Virtual Reality (VR) and Art Therapy (AT) groups with respect to the Control Group (CG), whose performance is statistically invariant. The adaptation levels and the improvement obtained suggest that VR and AT in the presented formats are in line with the sensory preferences and visuospatial strength of the ASD children participating in this study. Consequently, we may conclude that both art therapy and Virtual Reality are educational tools that can be satisfactory used as educational tools for ASD children.