Effectiveness of “Maghzineh” Attention Cognitive Video Games on Executive Functions of Children with Autism Spectrum disorder

Disfunction in executive functions is considered to be one of main problems of children with autism spectrum disorder. It is indicated that part of problems encountered by these children such as social communication might be the results of executive malfunction. Thus, in the present study, the effectiveness of Maghzineh cognitive video games on executive functions of children with autism was investigated. In order to study the effectiveness of a training based on these games, a quasi-experimental study was designed, with pre-test and post test and a control group. It was conducted on two groups of male children with autism spectrum disorder, aged 5 to 12 years in Soleimanieh, Iraq. All these children were diagnosed by the psychiatrist in a rehabilitation center. Ten children were randomly assigned to the experimental group and ten children to the control group. The experimental group played with cognitive games for 24 sessions while the control group received no intervention and waited in the waiting list. The Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Functions (Gioia, 2000) was used as the tool for evaluating the executive functions of these children. The collected data were analyzed by multivariate analysis of variance (MANCO VA). The results of multivariate analysis of variance showed a significant difference between the overall executive functions in the experimental and the control group (P≤0.05). Specifically, the results showed significant impact on attention shift, working memory, organization, and task monitoring of these children, which are directly targeted by Maghzineh video games. In contrast, the intervention was significantly effective on a some of sub-scales of exactutive functions, such as inhibition or initiation. In summary, due to the impact of Maghzineh video games on a group of the scales and the overall score of executive functions, it is recommended that these games would be available to children with autism and their families and schools as a complimentary educational tool in improving executive functions, which as it is indicated in the literature, might be effective on social communication and academic achievement of these children.