TWO THEORETICAL MODELS OF PRETEND PLAY: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY IN AUTISM

Background: A wealth of studies have pointed out pretend play is one of the areas of development most intensely affected in autism. Although the failure to use an object symbolically is considered one of the key marker of the pathology, there is a disagreement about the nature of this impairment. On one hand, the meta-representational hypothesis (Leslie, 1987), proposes that children with autism lack the fundamental ability of decoupling in order to either produce or comprehend pretend acts. On the other hand, the recent Cultural Learning approach (Rakoczy, 2006) considers pretence essentially a social  activity, acquired, in its early forms, through imitation of adults’ pretending acts whereas more mature forms involve the ability to share intentions and creativity. In this view, the lack of the fundamental motivation to share might preclude cooperative forms of pretending in autism.

Objectives:  To investigate early characteristics of pretend play deficit in autism in order to test the predictions deriving from two theoretical accounts.

Methods: 20 preschoolers with autism and 20 preschoolers with typical development, matched by mental age, were presented with a) four imitation tasks involving pretend actions (brushing teeth, washing hands, eating from a basket, drinking from a cup), b) a free pretend play situations (have a tea) and c) an object substitution task (using a banana like a telephone). 

Results: Preliminary results reveal a preserved ability to comprehend and produce simple pretending actions in scaffolded situation (imitation tasks) in children with autism compared to control group, but their performance shows little imagination and creativity especially in free play situation, where they produced fewer novel acts and tend to imitate adult’s actions.

Conclusions: Our results support Cultural Learning approach, showing that the ability to pretend is not totally affected in autism, but the deficit seems to be limited to forms of pretending that involve shared intentions.