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Episodic Future Thinking in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Abstract

The capacity to imagine oneself experiencing future events has important implications for effective daily living but investigation of this ability in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is limited. This study investigated future thinking in 30 children with high functioning ASD (IQ > 85) and 30 typically developing children. They completed the Adapted Autobiographical Interview, a measure which required participants to describe personal past events (indexing episodic memory) and plausible future events (indexing episodic future thinking). The results showed that there are ASD-related deficits in future thinking, and also provided preliminary evidence regarding cognitive mechanisms that may (and may not) contribute to these difficulties. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

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Notes

  1. We thank Donna Addis for providing advice and detailed manuals for Autobiographical Interview administration and scoring procedures consistent with Addis et al. (2008), and for data and information allowing inter-rater reliabilities to be calculated between the scorer in the current study and those from her lab.

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Acknowledgments

We would like express our appreciation to Autism Victoria, the Asperger’s Association Network and Voice and Movement for assisting with the recruitment of children with ASD. We also thank Jade Russo for assisting with data collection, Fiona Sparrow for transcribing the interviews and Ashleigh Dever for scoring the AIs. We would also like to thanks Donna Addis for generously sharing the materials, and her advice on conducting and scoring of the adapted Autobiographical Interview AI.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne Campus, Locked Bag 4115, Fitzroy, MDC, VIC, 3065, Australia

    Gill Terrett, Peter G. Rendell & Sandra Raponi-Saunders

  2. School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Julie D. Henry

  3. School of Social Sciences and Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Phoebe E. Bailey

  4. Department of Psychology, Technische Universitaet, Dresden, Germany

    Mareike Altgassen

  5. Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Mareike Altgassen

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  1. Gill Terrett
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Correspondence to Gill Terrett.

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Terrett, G., Rendell, P.G., Raponi-Saunders, S. et al. Episodic Future Thinking in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord 43, 2558–2568 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-013-1806-y

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