THE Reverend W. Awdry, the creator of Thomas the Tank Engine, was on to something in 1943 when he developed the smiling steam engine. It turns out that putting a human face on a cartoon train, bus or tram can help children with autism understand emotions.
The head of the University of Cambridge's Autism Research Centre, Simon Baron-Cohen, conducted a study using a series of 15 animated stories called The Transporters. Each episode focused on a different emotion - from simple ones such as happy, sad and angry to more complex emotions such as sorry, ashamed, tired and joking.
The findings, published in the Journal of Autism and Development Disorders in November, showed children with autism spectrum conditions had improved emotion recognition after watching the 3D program for 15 minutes a day over a month.
Professor Baron-Cohen said using mechanical vehicles also helped, as things such as trains and trams behaved in predictable ways.
''Children with autism and Asperger syndrome love order and predictability. So they shy away from people. To them, we're confusing and unpredictable,'' he said.
Autism is a development disorder characterised by impaired social interaction and communication skills, which can impact on academic performance.
''Often these children are not very motivated to learn, so part of the problem in the past has been how do you persuade a child to take part in social skills training,'' Professor Baron-Cohen said.
But the animated series, which is aimed at two- to eight-year-olds and uses objects children with autism enjoy, appears to work.
Children with autism who participated in the study, aged four to seven, caught up with other children in their ability to recognise emotions - a skill present from at least 10 weeks of age in typically developing infants.
Visiting Sydney this week, Professor Baron-Cohen said the goal of the project was to teach autistic children to recognise ''real emotions on real people'', so real-life faces of actors were used in the The Transporters series instead of animated cartoon faces.
''We want to use the animated vehicle as a bridge into our world but in order to do that we have to join their predictable world,'' he said. ''This was a way to meet them half way.''
The eight characters created for the series are part of a toy set in a boy's bedroom and include trams, cable cars, a funicular railway and a chain ferry. The toys move in a predictable, repetitive path restricted to the tracks or cables they move on.
''[This] allows affective information that would otherwise be confusing to become more intelligible and appealing to the autistic mind,'' the study concluded