Designing, Developing, and Evaluating a Global Filter to Work Around Local Interference for Children with Autism

People have an innate ability to process environmental information by integrating and updating multiple streams of sensory input. When local and global visual information are not integrated smoothly, it becomes difficult for an individual to formulate the whole from the details. This ability is important when it comes to understanding a scene or "seeing the big picture." In this work, we design, develop, and evaluate a system to augment the integration of global with local features, alongside Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) who work with autistic children having significant speech and language disorders. We present our preliminary experiment with a high-fidelity global filter and hypothesize that the filtered image can shift eye gaze (and therefore visual attention) from local details to global features. Global interpretation will be further encouraged by asking participants "what was the picture about?" We present results and discuss limitations and future work.