The development of episodic future thinking in middle childhood

The ability to imagine future events (episodic future thinking-EFT) emerges in preschoolers and further improves during middle childhood and adolescence. In the present study, we focused on the possible cognitive factors that affect EFT and its development. We assessed the ability to mentally project forward in time of a large cohort of 135 6- to 11-year-old children through a task with minimal narrative demands (the Picture Book Trip task adapted from Atance and Meltzoff in Cogn Dev 20(3):341-361. doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2005.05.001, 2005) in order to avoid potential linguistic effects on children's performance. The results showed that this task can be used to assess the development of EFT at least until the age of 8. Furthermore, EFT scores correlated with measures of phonological short-term and verbal working memory. These results support the possibility that cognitive factors such as working memory play a key role in EFT.

Brief Report: Self-Based and Mechanical-Based Future Thinking in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

This brief report is a partial replication of the study by Jackson and Atance (J Dev Disabil 14:40-45, 2008) assessing nonverbal Self-based and Mechanical-based future thinking (FT) in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In a first step, these tasks were administered to 30 children with ASD. The two Self-based tasks were then modified as a verbal component could not be completely ruled out. Consequently, 77 children with ASD and 77 children with typical development received the modified Self-based FT tasks and the Mechanical-based FT tasks. We partially replicated the previous findings. Participants with ASD had impaired FT in both kinds of tasks and both groups performed better on tasks assessing Mechanical-based FT than Self-based FT. These results suggest that impairments of FT in ASD are not limited to Self-Projection.