Improving social-emotional abilities in children with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities through a person-centred eye-tracking-based training: A pilot study

Individuals with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD) are characterized by a combination of a profound intellectual disabilities and a profound motor disability frequently associated with a number of additional severe secondary disabilities or impairments. The aim of this pilot study was to evaluate the effects of an innovative person-centred training based on eye-tracking computerised serious games on the social-emotional abilities in these individuals with PIMD. Nine participants aged 7-18 years were followed over a period of 1 year. A pre-test (T1) - training - post-test (T2) design was used. During T1 and T2, visual attention and six social-emotional abilities (preferential attention to biological motion, social orienting, facial expression exploration, emotional faces discrimination, joint attention and socio-moral evaluations) were assessed using an eye-tracking-based experimental paradigm combining various visual preference tasks. During the training, each participant benefited from personalized one-to-one sessions tailored to their skills based on results of T1 and the observations of their practitioners. To implement person-centred training, the experimenter chose from a set of serious games to train these social-emotional abilities, those he felt were best suited to the participant's current state of heath and alertness, personal skills and specific needs. All participants improved their visual exploration between T1 and T2. In addition, they all made progress on at least one of the six social-emotional competencies. These results showed preliminary evidence that it is possible to increase some social-emotional abilities in these individuals with an adapted training, thus indicating that they also have unsuspected learning abilities.