A systematic review: Attention assessment of virtual reality based intervention for learning in children with autism spectrum disorder

This paper presents a systematic review of evidence based studies on attention detection and measurement in virtual reality (VR) based learning intervention for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). We carried out a search from three different large databases for articles between January 2008 and May 2017. The objective of this paper is to review learning intervention studies featuring measures of attention as an outcome variable for children with ASD in a virtual reality environment thereby addressing four specific questions: what are the types of attention studied in a virtual reality environment for children with ASD, the attentional behaviors, the technology used in detecting and measuring the attentional behaviors and the synthesis of empirical evidence across the reviewed studies. In the context of (VR) environment, there are five types of attention studied in the reviewed articles where nine attentional behaviors were targeted with six different technologies and strategies. The synthesis of the empirical studies reviewed showed that two out of five types of attention are always targeted for attention evaluation, four out of the nine types of attentional behaviors are commonly studied, two out of the six technologies are mostly used and two out of the six strategies of attention assessment are popularly used. The synthesis outcome of this systematic review can serve as an evidence base for researchers who are interested in attention assessment of children with ASD in a virtual reality environment.