Abstract
Terrett, G., Rendell, P. G., Raponi-Saunders, S., Henry, J. D., Bailey, P. E., & Altgassen, M. (2013). Episodic future thinking in children with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Advance online publication. doi:10.1007/s10803-013-1806-y
This is only the second study to date addressing future thinking in children with ASDs (the first being the Jackson and Atance, 2008, study also reviewed in this issue of Word of Mouth [WoM]). This study provided further support for the presence of deficits in episodic past and episodic future thinking in persons with ASD. The purposes of this study were as follows:
To establish the nature and magnitude of ASD-related difficulties on a measure of episodic future thinking.
To investigate the specific contributions of episodic memory to future thinking performance.
The Study
Participants
Thirty children with ASD (Asperger syndrome n = 22, high functioning autism n = 8) aged 8 to 12 years and a comparison group of 30 typically developing (TD) children matched on age and Full scale and Verbal IQ (IQ range = 87–142).
Procedures
The researchers then adapted Autobiographical Interview (AI) procedures (Addis, Wong, & Schacter, 2008). The participant was instructed to generate details about a past or future event in response to a cue word. For example, for past events, participants are instructed to describe a specific event in the past that the word book makes them think of. For future events, participants are instructed to imagine a time in the future that the word bath makes them think of. Children in this study were asked to generate three events in each of two conditions (past few months and next few months).
Two positive (friend, easy), two negative (naughty, tired), and two neutral (bath, book) words were used as cue words. Before commencing trials for each temporal direction, children were given instructions that included a demonstration of an event description; the past event demonstration described a visit to an aunt’s house by the lake, and the future event demonstration related to a first day at high school. They were given 3 min to generate as many details as possible about an event that they experienced in the past/could imagine experiencing in the future. The event did not have to relate directly to the cue word and participants were encouraged to freely associate. They were told that the event had to refer to a specific time and place, had to be less than 1 day in duration, and future events had to be realistic and not previously experienced. Participants were also directed to describe the event from their own perspective rather than that of an observer. During the 3 min, the relevant cue word was displayed on a card along with the task instruction (recall past event or imagine future event). If required, general probes were given by the experimenter. This involved asking general questions to clarify instructions and facilitate further description of event details.
Scoring of Interview Protocols
A central event was first identified in the transcription for each cue word trial, and this was then sectioned into key details, or unique chunks of information. These details were categorized as either internal (episodic information related to central event) or external (nonepisodic details, including semantic information, information of other events not specific in time and place to the central event, and repetitions). The number of internal details generated for future events was the primary measure of episodic future thinking and the number of internal details for past events indexed episodic memory.
Results
The ASD group performed less well than the TD group on both temporal directions of the AI: remembering past events (episodic memory) and imagining new events (episodic future thinking).
TD and ASD groups were better at remembering past events than imagining future events.
The ASD group generated fewer internal details than the TD group. ASD and TD groups generated more internal details on the past events task than on imagining new events. In addition, on the past events task the children with ASD generated more external details than the TD group.
Discussion
In WoM 24:3, I reviewed the types and development of ToM. Episodic memory is dependent on the development of intrapersonal ToM—the ability to reflect on your own thoughts, knowledge, and emotions, and using this knowledge to plan, guide, and monitor one’s behavior. Persons with ASD are known to have deficits in all aspects of ToM, so it is not surprising to find that they also have deficits in episodic memory. This study demonstrated that episodic future thinking places more demands on cognitive resources than past remembering because it involves not only retrieval of past experiences from episodic memory but also requires flexibly recombining those experiences to construct novel future events.
Like Jackson and Atance (2008), the authors of this article believe that difficulties with episodic future thinking might contribute to the core feature of behavioral inflexibility in persons with ASD. Given that a person’s current behavior is strongly influenced by how they anticipate the future will unfold, a reduced capacity to project forward in time is likely to be reflected in more limited behavioral repertoires. Thus, a reduced ability to pre-experience the future may contribute to persons with ASD fear of change and their insistence on sameness.
The AI described in this article could be a useful assessment and intervention monitoring tool for SLPs. Persons with Asperger syndrome frequently perform well on many formal tools assessing structural language skills and rote or scriptal memory tasks. In the summary of the Jackson and Atance article, I gave suggestions for strategies to develop episodic past and future thinking. SLPs could engage students in AI before beginning therapy to address episodic thinking and periodically during intervention to document their performance.