Autism
Do autistic children struggle to mentally simulate places and events?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Autistic children had more trouble finding hidden targets in a virtual island and gave less accurate accounts of past and future events, but did as well as peers on a theory-of-mind task and on memory for item pairings.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Case-control — Children with ASD vs matched typically developing children on a battery: virtual 'memory island' navigation, past/future event descriptions, animated-triangles ToM, relational recognition memory and segmented block design
- N
- N=40 · 20 children with ASD and 20 matched typically developing children (per abstract; the extracted text lacks the Participants section, and some analyses have fewer children, e.g. 38)
- Population
- Intellectually high-functioning children with autism spectrum disorder (mean age about 8) and sex-, age-, IQ- and language-matched typically developing children in the UK
- Outcome
- Virtual navigation efficiency (hidden vs visible targets), accuracy/specificity of past and future event descriptions, animations ToM score, relational recognition memory, central coherence
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Key findings
The autism group did as well as peers when targets were visible but took longer, succeeded less often and took longer routes when targets were hidden, and more repetitive behaviours went with poorer navigation. Their past and future event descriptions were less often judged accurate by parents, suggesting some confabulation. Contrary to predictions, the groups did not differ on the triangles theory-of-mind task or on memory for item-background combinations, and the predicted correlations between tasks mostly did not appear.
Methodology
The researchers compared 20 high-functioning children with autism to 20 typically developing children matched on sex, age, IQ and language. Children explored a virtual island to find objects that were either flagged (visible) or had to be remembered (hidden), described specific past and future events that parents later checked for accuracy, narrated animations of moving triangles, completed a recognition test for items, backgrounds and their combinations, and did segmented and unsegmented block design.
Limitations
The groups were small, so null results (theory of mind, relational memory) and the within-group correlations are fragile, as the authors acknowledge. The ToM task was hard for everyone, with the comparison group scoring near the floor on the mentalising clips, which may have hidden a real difference. The pattern is consistent with a shared self-projection or scene-construction deficit but does not prove it, since the predicted links between navigation, episodic memory and ToM did not emerge. The extracted text of this paper lacks the Introduction and Participants sections, so full recruitment and matching details could not be checked.
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