RESEARCH
The Transporters was evaluated by the Autism Research Centre, at the University of Cambridge, for its effectiveness for autistic children aged 4 to 8.
In all tasks on which the children were tested, most caught up with their typically developing peers
1.
The results suggest that The Transporters is an effective way to teach emotion recognition to autistic children
2.
The children showed that the learning generalises to new faces and new situations
3.
Children on the autistic spectrum who did not watch The Transporters remained below typically developing levels
4.
Four different emotion recognition tasks
Emotional vocabulary
Children were asked to define the 15 emotion words from the DVD and give examples of situations that evoked them
Familiar matching task
Children were told a familiar scenario that they would have seen in The Transporters. They were asked to choose the correct facial expressions from a choice of 3 animated faces
Close generalisation of skills
Children were asked to match animated familiar Transporters faces to situations they had not seen before
Distant generalisation to real human faces
Children were asked to match animated unfamiliar faces to unfamiliar situations