**Peopleâ??s brains in sync**
In 2010, while using hyperscanning to study spontaneous imitation in his native France, Dumas discovered that peopleâ??s brains synchronize with each other during social interaction â?? proving that people can literally be on the same wavelength.
Four years later, Dumas left France to do a post-doc in the U.S., where he continued his research. â??We developed a system to record a human being in interaction with a virtual avatar,â? Dumas recalled. â??The avatarâ??s behaviour wasnâ??t tightly scripted; it reacted to the human in real time, in milliseconds.â?
This virtual partner passed the Turing test, meaning it could not be distinguished from a human being. Dumas called the cognitive-neuroscience-based human-machine interaction system he had created the Human Dynamic Clamp. The avatar was able to adjust to human behaviours and also to prompt new ones through its interactions with users. Initially, it was tested on neurotypical humans.
Studies have suggested that sensory-motor differences in individuals diagnosed with ASD may be the cause of their social interaction difficulties.
The human-machine interface developed by Dumas supported the extraction of motor coordination and interpersonal synchronization indices, so he exploited these capabilities to create a new machine-assisted method of neuropsychological evaluation of ASD, which has since been clinically tested on more than 155 subjects and peer-validated.
As the machine had demonstrated its ability to teach new behaviours, Dumasâ?? team also worked on a version that could help people with autism develop their motor skills.
https://nouvelles.umontreal.ca/en/article/2022/12/08/pop-balloons-the-first-serious-mixed-reality-game-for-autistic-children/