Using Analog Tasks to Assess Children's Social Communication Skills

Purpose This tutorial addresses the use of analog tasks to assess social communication abilities in toddlers through adolescents. In analog tasks, clinicians manufacture situations that give rise to naturalistic social dilemmas (or dilemmas “analogous” to ones encountered in everyday interactions); the result is a sample of children's spontaneous, real-time, social communication performance, targeting specific behaviors of interest. Method/Results Potential social communication behaviors to be assessed and the critical impact of contextual factors on those behaviors are discussed. Next, analog tasks are defined, and their clinical benefits relative to other types of informal assessments are described. Several research-developed analog tasks, along with their key characteristics, are presented to illustrate these benefits and provide a starting place for clinicians to add analog tasks to their clinical toolbox. Finally, the process of developing analog tasks is described and applied in an example and associated case study, which together highlight the utility of analog tasks in identifying social communication deficits and potential strategies to facilitate intervention. Conclusions Improving clinicians' understanding, access to, and use of analog tasks will offer new ecologically valid assessment tools that efficiently capture representative and generalizable social communication performance and highlight specific strengths and weaknesses in context. Such results can provide a strong foundation for clinical decision making and improve the services provided to children with social communication disorders.

A-183 A Preliminary Study of Comfort with Computers and Analog Tasks in Relation to Older Adults’ Performance in Virtual Reality

Objective Neuropsychologists are using virtual reality to simulate everyday activities in order to increase ecological validity in neuropsychological assessments (Kane & Parsons, 2017). However, relatively little is known about the extent to which comfort with computers and analog tasks influences older adults’ performance on virtual reality-based tasks. Methods Healthy older adults (N = 42) rated how comfortable they are with computers and cooking meals in daily life and completed the Virtual Kitchen Protocol, a measure of procedural learning and memory for meal preparation tasks. Results Both higher comfort with cooking meals in a real kitchen and higher comfort with computers were associated with better learning, immediate recall, and delayed recall of the procedural task in virtual reality. However, comfort with computers did not explain a significant amount of variance in performance beyond comfort cooking in a real kitchen. Conclusion While both comfort with computers and analog versions of tasks may relate to older adults’ learning and memory in virtual reality, performance may be primarily related to analog abilities.

4104 Development and validation of parental empathy analog tasks

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Parents’ empathy toward their children affects their parenting, which can in turn impact child outcomes. Although parental empathy is theoretically distinct from trait empathy, current literature relies on largely self-report measures of parents’ trait empathy. Thus, the current study evaluated new analog assessments of parental empathy. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: One parental empathy analog measure (Empathy Measure for Parents Analog Task, Emotion Script; EMPAT-ES) was created based on parents’ responses to open ended prompts describing scenarios that elicit different emotions (e.g., happy, mad, sad, scared) in children. These responses were used to create short scripts. A second analog task (EMPAT, Emotion Audio) was created using 20 sec audio clips of children expressing the different emotions wherein participants respond with how they feel hearing the emotions and separately, how they believe the child feels. After an initial pilot, both versions of the EMPAT-E were administered to 120 families enrolled in a prospective longitudinal study. Parents completed self-report measures of trait empathy and parental empathy, as well as the EMPAT-ES and EMPAT-EA analog tasks. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Internal consistency of both the EMPAT-ES and EMPAT-EA tasks are expected to be robust, demonstrating the reliability of these novel assessments of parental empathy. Results are also expected to demonstrate the construct and convergent validity of both analog tasks. These new measures of parental empathy are expected to be significantly associated with measures of trait empathy. Specifically, parents’ responses indicating how they believe the child feels in the analog are expected to be strongly related to their reported emotion recognition abilities and responses indicating how analog items made parents feel are expected to be related to parents’ empathic concern. Finally, parents’ responses to the analog tasks are anticipated to be strongly associated with parents’ self-reported parental empathy. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Valid, novel assessments of parental empathy can impact the parenting literature as well as community intervention and prevention efforts with parents. Such analog tasks can bolster parenting research but they may also be translated to the community setting as a training tool wherein parents are taught new skills that promote more positive parenting.