TRIANGULATING PSYCHOPOMP, BOT AND AVATAR TO CREATE A TECHNO-PSYCHOGOGIC LEARNING ACTIVITY SYSTEM FOR AUTISM TREATMENT

The number of individuals diagnosed with autism has increased drastically from 2 to 4 per 10,000 births in the 1990’s to 60 to 116 per 10,000 births in the 2000’s. As a result, many countries, especially in Europe and North America, have channeled their resources into research to address the autism epidemic in two main aspects: (1) to understand the onset and causes of autism in order to develop better diagnostic screening tools; and (2) to determine the effectiveness of a wide range of intervention strategies to treat autism. This paper focuses on the latter basing on two treatment approaches: psychogogy and technogogy. Psychogogy, literally means to lead the mind, involves corrective, remedial, assistive and/or compensatory strategies to modify the mind’s processes in order to maximize learning and behavioral potentials. Technogogy, literally means to be led by technology, refers to the convergence of technology, pedagogy and content in the transformative use of technology to foster learning and behavior development. In the psychogogic domain, a guiding agent known as psychopomp is needed to enter an autistic mind in order to understand it to help that individual. In the technogogic domain, there are two types of guiding agents: the bot and the avatar. The former is an autonomous computer software that operates as an agent for a user or a program to simulate a human activity, while the latter is a user’s customizable on-screen character or persona in a computer game. Each of these guiding agents is a learning activity system. Understanding and triangulating all these three systems to integrate both psychogogy and technogogy will provide a new autism treatment framework with a fresh techno-psychogogic perspective.