Game Theory Teaching Strategy to Improve Social Skills for Children with Autism

Children with autism often suffer from social difficulties, impaired verbal communication, repetitive behaviors, and poor emotional control. However, these symptoms can be alleviated to some extent with timely intervention. Current studies have placed children with autism as another normal person or observer for social interaction training. Autistic children encounter difficulties in mentalizing during these trainings. Still, few studies have provided solutions for children with autism when they face interactions with people that create mentalizing difficulties. This study utilizes game theory to address the issue of mentalization in children with autism. It integrates targeted social activities with game rules and concept maps, and develops augmented reality game software to create a social skill training system. The simulation experiment results present that the game theory teaching strategy proposed in this study can teach children with ASD to make self-interested decisions when competing with people in the real world.