Designing Social Robots for Social-Cognition Training with Autistic Adults
Organizations: Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel · The Azrieli National Center for Autism and Neurodevelopment Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel · School of Brain Sciences and Cognition, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel
Abstract
Social robots have been widely explored as tools for autism intervention, yet this literature has focused predominantly on children and has rarely involved autistic adults as active contributors to design. This creates a mismatch between existing systems and the social-cognitive challenges autistic adults actually face in everyday life, including navigating ambiguous interpersonal contexts, managing conversational timing, and interpreting implied emotional meaning. To address this gap, we conducted an online focus group and co-design session with five autistic adults to explore what a social robot for social-cognition training should do, how it should interact, and under what conditions it would be genuinely useful. The 90-minute session combined open discussion with structured co-design activities on a shared digital whiteboard, and the resulting verbal and visual data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The analysis yielded seven themes that define core design requirements: the robot should function as a scaffold rather than a substitute, prioritise authenticity over comfort, provide personalised and user-controlled feedback, accommodate emotional self-awareness gaps, respect privacy and contextual boundaries, support rehearsal for real-world social situations, and remain configurable in identity, form, and expression. Together, the findings suggest that autistic adults envision the robot not as a companion or live social assistant, but as a private, configurable rehearsal partner designed to support independence over time.
Figures & tables
| Theme | Primary design implication |
|---|---|
| 1. Scaffolding, not substitution | Design for progressive independence; measure success by transfer to unaided performance, not engagement with the robot. |
| 2. Authenticity over comfort | The robot should disagree, hold positions, and resist sycophancy; its non-humanness licenses honest feedback that human relationships cannot sustain. |
| 3. Personalised feedback design | Target distributed pragmatic competencies (tact, timing, body language, synchrony); allow user-selectable format and severity-threshold timing. |
| 4. Emotional self-awareness gaps | Route around alexithymia by inferring emotional state from behavioural proxies rather than requiring introspective self-report. |
| 5. Privacy and contextual limits | Confine the robot to private preparatory sessions; visible in-situ deployment would compound the camouflaging burden autistic adults already carry. |
| 6. Social rehearsal and preparation | The robot is an accessible, on-demand upgrade to existing self-developed preparation strategies; ecological validity of scenarios is critical. |