Brief Report: Self-Based and Mechanical-Based Future Thinking in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

This brief report is a partial replication of the study by Jackson and Atance (J Dev Disabil 14:40-45, 2008 (See CR12)) assessing nonverbal Self-based and Mechanical-based future thinking (FT) in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In a first step, these tasks were administered to 30 children with ASD. The two Self-based tasks were then modified as a verbal component could not be completely ruled out. Consequently, 77 children with ASD and 77 children with typical development received the modified Self-based FT tasks and the Mechanical-based FT tasks. We partially replicated the previous findings. Participants with ASD had impaired FT in both kinds of tasks and both groups performed better on tasks assessing Mechanical-based FT than Self-based FT. These results suggest that impairments of FT in ASD are not limited to Self-Projection.
Author(s): A. Marini[sup.1] [sup.2] , F. Ferretti[sup.3] , A. Chiera[sup.3] , R. Magni[sup.4] , I. Adornetti[sup.3] , S. Nicchiarelli[sup.3] , S. Vicari[sup.4] , G. Valeri[sup.4] Author Affiliations: (1) Department of [...]