Cristina A. Costescu

Babeș-Bolyai University | UBB · Department of Special Psychopedagogy

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) engage in highly perseverative and inflexible behaviours. Technological tools, such as robots, received increased attention as social reinforces and/or assisting tools for improving the performance of children with ASD. The aim of our study is to investigate the role of the robotic toy Keepon in a cognit...

Through this meta-analysis we aimed to provide an estimation of the overall effect of robot-enhanced therapy on psychological outcome for different populations, to provide average effect sizes on different outcomes, such as cognitive, behavioral and subjective, and to test possible moderators of effect size. From a total of 861 considered studies f...

This chapter analyses the rights of autistic people to participate in the process of designing, developing and experimentally testing digital tools to address their needs. This active participation can be achieved and facilitated in at least two ways: in research studies and in the design processes of tools and intervention strategies. For the part...

Executive functions are critical for adaptive responses in new and complex contexts. However, research indicates the presence of deficits in executive functions neurodiverse children. In this chapter, we synthesize evidence on the current digital technologies employed in training executive functions in neurodiverse children, such as autistic indivi...

This chapter summarizes the most used types of technological tools for clinical and educational interventions developed for autistic children. Since several studies emphasize the advantages and benefits of using technology for maximizing the learning process in autistic children, we provide o overview regarding the effectiveness of using virtual re...

Objective The aim of this study was to investigate the frequency and duration of technology use by autistic children, their primary activities when engaging with technology, and the association between technology use and quality of life. We assumed that technology serves as a means of communication with peers, and it is associated with an improved...

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of technology-based interventions on academic performance. To achieve this purpose a systematic review was conducted. Within the scope of this study EBSCO, Springer, ProQuest, Science Direct, Wiley Online Library, Taylor and Francis Online, databases were scanned, and 18 studies were included in...

This paper reports the results from a school-based intervention for primary and elementary children evaluating the AWAKE project. The AWAKE intervention is a universal program that can be applied by teachers and is designed to improve children’s executive functions and well as their social and emotional well-being. 141 children aged from 6 to 14 fr...

(1) Background: Children with reading difficulties may experience negative emotions and social isolation. The cognitive emotion regulation strategies that they use in different reading tasks can make them more vulnerable in the stressful situations. Using adaptative emotion regulation strategies may help them overcome stressful reading situations....

Background: Up to 80% of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have mental health issues—either emotional or behavioral problems. The underlying mechanisms are still unknown, even if emotional regulation (ER) is considered to play a major role in child and adolescent psychopathology. Several studies link the ability to regulate the intensi...

Children with neurodevelopmental disorders have executive function deficits that can interfere with their academic performance and school adaptation. The use of computerized training programs has proven to be useful to improve executive functions, as well as reading and math performance. We developed a digital game for assessing and improving susta...

The current paper explores the relationship between technological knowledge, beliefs about technology use in education, beliefs about the limits of technology use with respect to children with disabilities, self-efficacy beliefs, and their effects on technology use or teacher practices in the special education setting regarding mathematics educatio...

social communication represents one of the main areas of impairment in the case of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (APA, 2013). Several studies have investigated predictors in this domain; however, the results are mostly inconsistent or lack clarity. The purpose of this theoretical review is to analyze studies that address vocabular...

Many children have undetected vision problems or insufficient visual information processing that may be a factor in lower academic outcomes. The aim of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the importance of vision screening for school-aged children, and to investigate the possibilities of how eye-tracking (ET) technologies can s...

Emotional dysregulation problems seem to affect more than 80% of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and may include irritability, aggressive behaviors, self-injury, and anxiety. Even though these types of problems are very common and affect the well-being of individuals with ASD, there are no objective assessment tools developed for this po...

3D technology has become one of the basic elements of computer-aided workflows, and due to its attention-grabbing effect, it is also used in education, whether it is illustrative methods used in teaching or computer-aided design. In this paper we analyzed the effectiveness of the 2D and 3D environment while performing a problem-solving task using e...

Objective: The aim of this article was to explore the effectiveness of rational emotive and cognitive-behavioral therapy (REBT) in a clinical setting. Methods: This study included 349 patients of the Albert Ellis Institute who sought psychotherapy from 2007 to 2016. Analyses were conducted by using the intent-to-treat principle, and outcomes wer...

Recent research indicates there are different cognitive patterns and coping mechanisms related to increased levels of Internet use and emotional distress in adolescents. This study aims to investigate the relationship between coping mechanisms, dysfunctional negative emotions, and Internet use. A total of 54 participants aged between 14 and 19 year...

Background Children and adolescents are major computer and technology gadget users. While serious games hold important promises for promoting health-related behavioral change and mental health among children and adolescents, their efficacy is yet unclear.Objectives We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to offer a comprehensive pi...

The aim of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of children's vision care from the identification to treatment, with, in particular, a better understanding of the use of eye tracking (ET) technologies. While there are indications that these technologies can support vision care, a comprehensive understanding of the possibilities is...

Due to the development of digital tools in the information society, all arenas of society are constantly changing, including the process and methods of education and learning. Both students and educators familiar with the use of digital devices have a significant presence of digital technology in their daily lives, not only in connection with teach...

Eye movement tracking systems offer the opportunity to observe and study a complex cognitive process such as programming. As a consequence of the growing number of program systems, software developers need to be able to use more and more programming technologies effectively. The paper analyses one of the possibilities of the C# programming language...

We present a dataset of behavioral data recorded from 61 children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The data was collected during a large-scale evaluation of Robot Enhanced Therapy (RET). The dataset covers over 3000 therapy sessions and more than 300 hours of therapy. Half of the children interacted with the social robot NAO supervise...

The main objective of this study is to investigate the multiple relations and to determine the differences between executive functions (EFs), emotion regulation, and behavioral and emotional problems in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline intellectual disability (ID), and typical development (TD). The sample in...

This paper presents an exploratory study designed for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) that investigates children's awareness of being imitated by a robot in a play/game scenario. The Nao robot imitates all the arm movement behaviors of the child in real-time in dyadic and triadic interactions. Different behavioral criteria (i.e., eye...

Among social skills that are core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder, turn-taking plays a fundamental role in regulating social interaction and communication. Our main focus in this study is to investigate the effectiveness of a robot-enhanced intervention on turn-taking abilities. We aim to identify to what degree social robots can improve turn-...

Imitation plays an important role in development, being one of the precursors of social cognition. Even though some children with autism imitate spontaneously and other children with autism can learn to imitate, the dynamics of imitation is affected in the large majority of cases. Existing studies from the literature suggest that robots can be used...

Visually demanding tasks such as reading, writing or playing, depend on our ability to maintain accurate and steady eye movements and coordinate the muscles controlling our eyes. Problems in our eye-muscle coordination, oculomotor dysfunctions (OMD) are common visual disturbances and can be trained to be better. The aim of this paper is to illustra...

The last few decades have seen widespread advances in technological means to characterise observable aspects of human behaviour such as gaze or posture. Among others, these developments have also led to significant advances in social robotics. At the same time, however, social robots are still largely evaluated in idealised or laboratory conditions...

Teaching different programming subjects is an increasing challenge nowadays as because of growing user demands, the latest paradigms and technologies must be taught. Students in higher education now are of the age who were born into the digital world; however, the success of fulfilling programming courses is lagging behind. Human-computer interface...

Recognition of facial expressions is one of the basic skills used to understand the feelings and intentions of others and it represents a crucial ability for establishing interpersonal connections in life. Previous studies have shown that the ability to recognize emotions, the speed and accuracy, with which individuals process emotions, appears to...

In perception and activity tasks, continuous visual tracking of the performed activity requires continuous eye motion. Besides writing and reading, the cooperative work of eyes and hands is a key factor when drawing and at certain motions (e.g. ball catching or throwing); during the exact execution of motions, eye-hand coordination has the utmost i...

The continuous visual tracking of activity performed in perception and action activities requires continuous eye motion. The visual computer monitoring, recording and evaluation of human motion provides many opportunities in the development of human-computer interfaces. In most activities performed by humans, eye-hand coordination plays a significa...

Through the analysis of eye motion, human cognitive activity, specific cognitive processes may be indirectly monitored. To track eye motion, several video-based devices have been developed, such as Gazepoint GP3. In the demo, the gaze path recording is demonstrated using GP3 device, then the evaluation of gaze fixations using OAGAMA software are ev...

Eye-tracking is a widely used method to examine the hidden cognitive processes. In this paper a program source code debugging process is examined by eye-tracking method. A computer based analysis was elaborated to test the debug process and record the main parameters of eye movement. During the test, two typical groups were established, in case of...

Recently, researches based on eye-tracking have more often appeared on the field of cognitive studies, education support systems and virtual reality. Eye-tracking based analysis may be useful in IT, particular in algorithm thinking, program code debugging. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the conditions of Gazepoint GP3 device and OGAMA us...

There are several factors associated with language deficits in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Previous research identified theory of mind difficulties, executive function deficits, abstract thinking and social information processing deficits as being linked with language deficits in ASD. However when it comes to the co-occurance of A...

Robot-assisted therapy (RAT) offers potential advantages for improving the social skills of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). This article provides an overview of the developed technology and clinical results of the EC-FP7-funded Development of Robot-Enhanced therapy for children with AutisM spectrum disorders (DREAM) project, which a...

Social difficulties is a core symptom of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). One of the main psychological factors supposed to underlie these difficulties is the lack or low levels of joint attention (JA) with the interaction partners. The use of a social robot in ASD interventions has received a lot of attention in the last years. The main objective o...

It is evident that recently reported robot-assisted therapy systems for assessment of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) lack autonomous interaction abilities and require significant human resources. This paper proposes a sensing system that automatically extracts and fuses sensory features such as body motion features, facial expressions...

Background. Children with autism have considerable difficulties in identifying and conceptualizing thoughts and feelings, which affect their ability to manage emotions (Sofronoff, et al., 2007). Objectives. By using robot-enhanced therapy (RET) we have tried to: improve the strategies they use in different social situations; modify irrational belie...

Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has successfully been used to improve social skills in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) through remote control of the robot in so-called Wizard of Oz (WoZ) paradigms. However, there is a need to increase the autonomy of the robot both to lighten the burden on human therapists (who have to remain in control...

Background: Social robots may represent an important technological instrument for improving the social abilities of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Objectives: This work describes exploratory research in which a doctor game scenario, involving a social robot and a human partner, was implemented and tested with children with ASD. Pati...

There has been a considerable transformation in game preferences of children with the rapid development of information and communication technology. Computer games became the mostly preferred spare time activity for children of different ages. Several studies found that technology, ranging from computer applications to social robots, can act as a m...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with amplified emotional responses and poor emotional control. However, little is known about the differences between typically developing (TD) children and children with ASD regarding the underlying mechanisms of dysfunctional emotions and maladaptive behaviors. We aimed to investigate whether if childr...

Recent research has shown that social robots are beneficial in therapeutic interventions for children with autism in clinical environment. For the generalization of the skills learned in therapy sessions outside the clinic or laboratory, the therapeutic process needs to be continued at home. Therefore, social robotic devices should be designed with...

The use of partially autonomous robots in therapeutic contexts raises several ethical issues, starting with the degree of autonomy to be afforded to the robot. The more autonomous the robot, the less control therapists have over the robot-child interaction, raising the issue of where the responsibility for the robot's actions lies. Autonomy also ra...

The use of robots in therapy for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) raises issues concerning the ethical and social acceptability of this technology and, more generally, about human-robot interaction. However, usually philosophical papers on the ethics of human-robot-interaction do not take into account stakeholders' views; yet it is impo...

Over the last decade, integrated philosophical and neuroscientific studies of empathy have been steadily growing, because of the pivotal role that empathy plays in social cognition and ethics, as well as in the understanding of human behavior both under physiological conditions and in the presence of mental disorders. The umbrella concept of empath...

Previous studies show that empathy deficits are considered an important barrier for the social development of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study compares the empathic responses between a group of children with ASD and a group of typically developing (TD) children. We included 63 children, out of which 26 had a diagno...

Many robots capable of performing social behaviors have recently been developed for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) studies. These social robots are applied in various domains such as education, entertainment, medicine, and collaboration. Besides the undisputed advantages, a major difficulty in HRI studies with social robots is that the robot platfor...

Children with autism spectrum disorders have difficulties in identifying situation-based emotions, which is a fundamental ability for mind reading. Social robots received increased attention as assisting tools for improving the social and emotional skills of children with autism. This study investigates whether the social robot Probo can help child...

Background and Objectives The aim of this exploratory study is to test whether social stories presented by a social robot have a greater effect than ones presented on a computer display in increasing the independency in expressing social abilities of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Although much progress has been made in developing i...

Robot-assisted therapy (RAT) is an emerging field that has already seen some success and is likely to develop in the future. One particular application area is within therapies for autism spectrum disorders, in which the viability of the approach has been demonstrated. The present paper is a vision paper with the aim of identifying research direct...

This paper aims to study the role of the social robot Probo in providing assistance to a therapist for robot assisted therapy (RAT) with autistic children. Children with autism have difficulties with social interaction and several studies indicate that they show preference toward interaction with objects, such as computers and robots, rather than w...

This paper presents a series of 4 single subject experiments aimed to investigate whether children with autism show more social engagement when interacting with the Nao robot, compared to a human partner in a motor imitation task. The Nao robot imitates gross arm movements of the child in real-time. Different behavioral criteria (i.e. eye gaze, gaz...