Future Thinking in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Background: All typically-developing humans can direct their thinking away from the present and towards the future. Future thinking ability lies at the root of our ability to delay gratification, plan ahead, and anticipate future events. Without this ability, our behavior in the present would appear unusually restricted, inflexible, and seemingly unreasonable. We propose that difficulties in future thinking ability may characterize children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (CWAs), thus accounting for some of the inflexibility in their thinking.

Objectives: This study examined future thinking skills in CWAs, using two types of future thinking tasks that we termed self-based and mechanical-based. We argue that self-based tasks require a projection of the self into the future to pre-experience an event, whereas mechanical-based tasks require reasoning about future physical transformations. We predicted that CWAs would perform better on mechanical-based tasks than on self-based tasks, since the latter rely heavily on a concept of a future self, and hence on theory of mind skills, which are frequently impaired in CWAs.

Methods: Fourteen children, diagnosed with Autistic Disorder, Asperger’s Syndrome, or Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified by independent clinicians, completed 10 tasks; 5 of each of the two types described above. They also completed the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, 3^rd edition (Dunn & Dunn, 1997).  

Results: CWAs passed significantly more of the mechanical tasks (M = 2.07) than the self tasks (1.14), z = -2.59, p = .01.

Conclusions: Although the results must be considered preliminary due to the small sample size, this study is an important addition to the body of autism literature which, to date, has not targeted future thinking skills. Our next step is to examine future thinking skills in a larger, more representative, sample of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.