The development of episodic future thinking in typically and atypically developing children

Abstract

Episodic future thinking is the ability to pre-experience events that have yet to come (Atance & O’Neill, 2001). In order to better understand this skill, this thesis investigates future thinking over the course of development. In three studies, we looked at the ways that we test episodic future thinking, developed a new test of this ability and used this in a population of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). In the first, we found that behavioural tests of episodic future thinking correlate with verbal measures. Behavioural tests have been designed to evaluate episodic thought and have been used widely in the literature on memory and planning in non-verbal populations (Osvath & Osvath, 2008). Until now the degree to which performance on behavioural tests is related to the more standard verbal tests of future thinking has been unknown. This finding provides validation for the continued use of these behavioural methodologies. In my second study, we address one criticism of behavioural methodology to date; that it may be possible to rely on associative learning to pass these experiments (Atance, 2015). We evaluated children’s reliance on this strategy by developing a new spoon test that controls for associative memory. We found that this change disrupted performance in a population of four-year-olds. When we removed controls for associative learning, this age group passed at a rate higher than chance, comparable to results from previous behavioural studies (Atance & Sommerville, 2014; Scarf, Gross, Colombo, & Hayne, 2013). These results suggest that associative learning does substantially impact performance on item-choice tasks in younger age groups. Finally, we piloted this new test in a group of children with ASD, a population that is known to have deficits in episodic memory. In keeping with the theory that it is necessary to remember past experience in order to flexibly prepare for the future, we found a significant difference between episodic future thinking skills in children with ASD as compared to a control group.