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Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder Retrieve Spatiotemporal Details During Episodic Future Thinking

Sat, March 23, 9:45 to 11:15am, Hilton Baltimore, Floor: Level 1, Peale A

Integrative Statement

Introduction. Adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulty constructing future scenes (Lind, Williams, Bowler, & Peel, 2014). Few studies have investigated the extent to which children with ASD can retrieve relevant details from episodic memory and generate a personal future scene in middle childhood, a period of marked episodic memory development.

Hypotheses. We hypothesize that children with ASD will have greater difficulty incorporating episodic details during future thinking (FT) than typically-developing children.

Study Population. Thirty-eight children with ASD (mean: 10.2 years; range: 8 to 13 years; Mean IQ: 103.55 measured by DAS-II) were compared to 38 typically-developing children matched for age, sex, and IQ. Children were subdivided into younger (8- to 10-year-olds) and older (11- to 13-year-olds) groups.

Methods. Children learned a Song Game involving a specific three-step spatiotemporal sequence. For a song to play, participants had to move a specific character to a specific location in a specific order on a touchscreen. After the sequence and a 10-minute delay, children were given an item recognition task: they were asked to tell which of two characters they had met before (recall condition) or will meet when they play the song again tomorrow (future condition). Mean recognition accuracy was computed by calculating the average accuracy across all three trials. Then, they were asked to remember how they played the song before (recall condition) or to show how they would play it tomorrow (future condition); the condition order was counterbalanced. Accuracy was measured as the rate of successful completion of the entire sequence resulting in the song playing.

Results. For the item recognition task (Fig. 1), a mixed-model ANOVA revealed significant main effects of age group (younger vs. older), F(1,72)=5.75,p=0.019, and condition (recall vs. future), F(1,72)=19.60,p<0.001, and an interaction between age group and condition F(1,72)=7.17,p=0.009. Diagnosis (ASD vs. typically-developing) did not affect item recognition. For the song task (Fig. 2), a mixed-model ANOVA yielded a significant main effect of diagnosis, F(1,72)=7.10,p=0.009 -- children with ASD performed better than typically-developing children. The analysis also found a marginal interaction between age group and condition, F(1,72)=3.36,p=0.071. Additional analyses examined children’s accuracy for temporal- and spatial-specific details in the Song task. An ANOVA that examined the effects of diagnosis, age group, condition, and detail type (spatial vs. temporal) on detail-specific accuracy found a significant interaction between age group, condition, and detail type, F(1,72)=4.02,p=0.049. This interaction was driven primarily by age-related improvements in temporal-detail accuracy during FT across all participants regardless of diagnosis (Younger: M=0.88,SD=0.28; Older: M=0.99,SD=0.05), t(74)=2.47,p=0.016.

Discussion. These results indicate that children with ASD and their typical counterparts show age-related improvements in FT, specifically in retrieving temporal details. However, children with ASD outperform typically-developing children in playing the song. It is possible that the goal-oriented nature of the future condition provided children with ASD task-related support (Bowler, Matthews, & Gardiner, 1997) to reproduce the correct sequence for the song reward. These results have important implications for learning and provide avenues for potential intervention that could alleviate FT demands in individuals with ASD.

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