Soizic Gauthier

In the rapidly evolving landscape of education, the integration of technology and innovative pedagogical approaches has become imperative to engage learners effectively. Our workshop aimed to delve into the intersection of technology, cognitive psychology, and educational theory to explore the potential of multimodal interfaces in transforming the learning experience for both regular and special education. Its interdisciplinary brought together experts from fields of human-computer interaction, education, cognitive science, and computer science. To give further insights to participants discussions, 3 keynotes from experts in the field, 6 presentations of accepted short-papers from participants, and 6 in-loco demos of relevant projects were performed. The high-level content approached tend to tailor works future developed towards this area.

Handwriting is an important skill in children development as well as in education that take years to be mastered. While keyboards and similar technological devices increasingly become more popular, new tools and engaging approaches are also required to keep children motivated in the learning process of this fundamental fine motor skill. In this paper, we present the iReCheck platform, an innovative multimodal interactive system capable of providing personalised handwriting training through a social robot companion and serious games in a tablet, easily adoptable by teachers and therapists in their daily educational practices. Results from studies in multiple contexts, such as schools, clinics, and hospitals are showing the potential application of our proposal not only to investigate handwriting itself but also in strongly correlated aspects, such as inner-motivation and student’s posture.

We report the case of an 8-year-old child with a complex neurodevelopmental disorder, including severe developmental coordination disorder with dysgraphia, anxiety and depression, mild social functioning impairments, headache and chronic musculoskeletal pain, secondary to Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) hypermobility type. We explored whether wearing whole-body compressive garments (CGs) could improve his motor skills assessed through standardized and experimental procedures. In addition to the effectiveness of CGs on pain, we found partial improvements in his motor skills, specifically postural control, hand movements, and body schema representation, after wearing CGs for 15 days. During an experimental motor imitation task with a virtual tightrope walker, we found improvements in interpersonal synchronization with performances closer to those of typical developing (TD) controls. We conclude that CGs appear to be an innovative and interesting adjuvant treatment for motor skill impairments in children with multidimensional impairments involving EDS. These promising results require confirmation by further evidence-based research.

The study of human behaviors in cognitive sciences provides clues to understand and describe people’s personal and interpersonal functioning. In particular, the temporal analysis of behavioral dynamics can be a powerful tool to reveal events, correlations, and causalities but also to discover abnormal behaviors. However, the annotation of these dynamics can be expensive in terms of temporal and human resources. To tackle this challenge, this article proposes a methodology to semiautomatically annotate behavioral data. Behavioral dynamics can be expressed as sequences of simple dynamical processes: transitions between such processes are generally known as change points. This article describes the necessary steps to detect and classify change points in behavioral data by using a data set collected in a real use-case scenario. This data set includes motor observations from children with typical development and with neurodevelopmental disorders. Abnormal movements that are present in such disorders are useful to validate the system in conditions that are challenging even for experienced annotators. Results show that the system: can be effective in the semiautomated annotation task; can be efficient in presence of abnormal behaviors; may achieve good performance when trained with limited manually annotated data.

Trouvant son origine dans l’observation des déficits empathiques de soignants travaillant avec des personnes présentant des troubles neurodégénératifs et des effets délétères de ceux-ci, cette thèse contribue à l’étude des mécanismes mis en jeu dans le processus empathique.Nous avons procédé à une analyse thématique d’un corpus neuroscientifique et psychanalytique représentatif et référentiel (Cooper, Randolph), pour saisir ce que signifiait l’empathie, comment en était décrit le processus, et quel avait été le trajet de ce terme. Psychanalyse et neurosciences divergent dans leur approche de l’empathie, mais se rejoignent également autour d’interrogations communes.Nous avons ensuite mené une recherche mixte, intégrée et concurrent, auprès de 85 enfants et adolescents présentant un trouble du spectre autistique (TSA), ou un trouble du développement de la coordination (TAC), ou un développement typique. Le versant quantitatif de cette recherche évalue la capacité des participants à adopter le point de vue d’autrui grâce au paradigme du funambule (Berthoz, Thirioux). Le versant qualitatif consiste en des études de cas reposant sur une sélection d’entretiens faisant suite à la passation, revenant sur les vécus subjectifs et les mécanismes mis en jeu par les participants pendant celle-ci.L’adoption du point de vue du funambule est modulée par l’âge, le sexe, le diagnostic. Les participants au développement typique et les participants TSA obtiennent des résultats comparables, tandis que les participants TAC adoptent significativement moins son point de vue. Le fait que notre protocole mette en jeu un personnage virtuel, et que les participants se tiennent à 2 mètres de lui, pourrait avoir eu une influence sur les performances des participants TSA.Les participants prompts à adopter le point de vue du funambule semblent être les plus aptes à réguler leurs émotions. Toutefois, certains participants n’ont pas adopté le point de vue du funambule, par choix et non pas par impossibilité. Pour aller plus loin, il nous faudrait étudier l’influence du type de régulation émotionnelle privilégiée sur le processus empathique et les limites de la propension à être empathique.Certains des participants, lorsqu’ils adoptent le point de vue du funambule, ont mis en place une « impersonnalisation » : ces participants créent un personnage, intime étranger qui ne se situe ni à la place du funambule, ni à leur place réelle, et qui leur permet d’adopter le point de vue du funambule, sans pour autant se confondre avec lui, faisant ainsi du processus empathique un échange à trois participants. A l’issue de cette recherche, nous avons relu la première expérience qui avait déclenchée cette thèse à la lumière des découvertes et connaissances acquises. Cela nous a mené à nous interroger sur la place de l’impersonnalisation, et donc du processus empathique, au sein de la pratique des psychologues cliniciens – mais aussi sur le destin de l’empathie des psychologues en formation

Background: In motor imitation, taking a partner’s perspective often involves a mental body transformation from an embodied, ego-centered viewpoint, to a disembodied, hetero-centered viewpoint. Impairments of both own-body-transformation (OBT) and abnormalities in visual spatial processing have been reported in patients with neurodevelopmental disorders including autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In the context of a visual-motor interactive task, studying OBT impairments while disentangling the contribution of visual spatial impairments associated with motor coordination problems has not been investigated. Methods: 85 children and adolescents (39 controls with typical development, TD; 29 patients with ASD; 17 patients with developmental coordination disorder, DCD), aged 6 to 19 years, participated in a behavioral paradigm in which participants interacted with a virtual tightrope walker (TW) standing and moving with him. The protocol enables to distinguish ego-centered and hetero-centered perspectives. Results: We show that (1) OBT was possible but difficult for children with neurodevelopmental disorders, as well as for TD children, when the task required the participant to perform a mental rotation in order to adopt a hetero-centered perspective (2) Using multivariate models, hetero-centered perspective score was significantly associated with age, TW orientation, latency and diagnosis. ASD and TD group’s performances were close and significantly correlated with age. It was not the case for DCD specifically handicapped by visual spatial impairments. (3) ASD and DCD did not perform similarly: motor performance as shown by movement amplitude was better in DCD than ASD. ASD motor response were more ambiguous and hardly readable. Conclusion: Changing perspective in a spatial environment is possible for patients with ASD although delayed compared with TD children. In patients with DCD their visual spatial impairments negatively modulated performances in the experiment.

Après un retour sur l’origine de l’empathie, la place du vécu du corps au sein de celle-ci sera interrogée en appui sur le récit fait par un jeune garçon présentant un syndrome d’Asperger au cours d’un entretien dans le cadre d’une recherche universitaire en psychologie. Il sera proposé que l’expérience de l’empathie peut avoir des effets sur la personnalisation, le sentiment d’installation de la psyché au sein du corps, avec de possibles conséquences quant à sa place dans la pratique des psychologues.

Background: Impairments in imitation abilities have been commonly described in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). How motricity in interpersonal coordination impacts imitation, during long lasting semi-ecological conditions, has not been carefully investigated. Methods: 85 children and adolescents (39 controls with typical development, TD; 29 patients with ASD; 17 patients with developmental coordination disorder, DCD), aged 6 to 20 years, participated to a behavioral paradigm in which participants, standing and moving, interacted with a virtual tightrope walker standing and moving as well. During the protocol, we measured automatically and continuously bodily postures and movements from RGB sensor recording to assess participants’ behavioral imitation. Results: We show that (1) interpersonal synchronization (as evidenced by the synchrony between the participant’s and the tightrope walker’s bars) and (2) motor coordination (as evidenced by the synchrony between the participant’s bar and its own head axis) increased with age and were more impaired in patients with ASD. Also, motor control as evidenced by the movement angle standard deviations of participants’ bar and head were significantly impaired in ASD compared to TD or DCD. Conclusion: Interpersonal synchronization and motor coordination during ecological interaction show both subtle impairment in children with ASD as compared to children with TD or DCD. These results questioned how motricity mature in terms of motor control and proprioception in children with ASD.