Impaired Competence for Pretense in Children with Autism: Exploring Potential Cognitive Predictors

Bigham, Sally

doi:10.1007/s10803-009-0820-6

Cited by 19 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Together with common cooccurring conditions, such as intellectual disability and epilepsy [3], children with ASD have poor adaptive functioning in multiple developmental areas (e.g., play) and are likely to face concurrent medical and educational difficulties in life. Early atypical signs of children with ASD in play, such as decreased pretend play in both quantity and quality, allow identification for early intervention [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Compared to children with intellectual disability or typical development, children with ASD not only engage in less pretend play, or decreased quantity, but also have more difficulties in spontaneously generating it. Moreover, when engaging in pretend play, children with ASD have decreased complexity, creativity, and flexibility, or decreased quality, and they need better-structured environments and more external facilitation [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. However, through engaging in pretend play, children build essential skills (e.g., fine motor and attention) and express both positive and negative feelings, all of which is crucial to promoting children's cognitive, social, language, and emotional development, as well as their well-being [13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hence, ToM is necessary for the interpretation of social cues for children to understand and shape their own contexts, and participate in their pretend play and social lives [16,[20][21][22][23]. Impaired ToM has been proposed to be associated with the pretend play deficit in children with ASD in the literature [4,11,12,24]. The awareness that one has different thoughts and feelings from those of others embedded in ToM makes humans able to escape from the original representation and generate a new representation, called metarepresentation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consequently, it is believed that ToM and pretend play share similar constructs and complement each other. Therefore, a ToM deficit in children with ASD could have the possibility of being a mediator to improve play participation in such children [4,11,12,24].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Theory of mind predominantly associated with the quality, not quantity, of pretend play in children with autism spectrum disorder

Lin

Tsai

et al. 2017

Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry

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This study aimed to clarify the relationships between theory of mind and pretend play in children with autism spectrum disorder, using refined assessments of theory of mind and pretend play while controlling for autistic behaviors and verbal comprehension. A total of 92 children with autism spectrum disorder aged 4-10 years were enrolled. In two visits, the children were assessed with the Theory of Mind Task Battery, the Child-Initiated Pretend Play Assessment, the Childhood Autism Rating Scale, and the Verbal Comprehension Index of the Wechsler Intelligence Scales, respectively, for their theory of mind, pretend play performance, autistic behaviors, and verbal comprehension. The hierarchical regression models showed that in addition to the contributions of the autistic behaviors and verbal comprehension scores, the theory of mind scores positively predicted (p < 0.001) the elaborateness scores of pretend play in the conventional imaginative and symbolic play contexts, respectively, accounting for an additional 8.1 and 18.5% of the variance, but did not predict the scores for number of object substitutions or imitated actions. The findings demonstrate that theory of mind has a predominant role in the quality, not the quantity, of pretend play of children with autism spectrum disorder, when the children's autistic behaviors and verbal comprehension are considered. This study fills a gap in the previous literature and provides information useful for clinicians and researchers on the relationships between theory of mind and pretend play in children with autism spectrum disorder.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Theory of mind predominantly associated with the quality, not quantity, of pretend play in children with autism spectrum disorder

Lin

Tsai

et al. 2017

Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry

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“…The student is expected to recall and apply the strategies and content when elicited by task requirements. All of these skills are part of the expectations inherent in the student role (Bigham, 2010 ).…”

Section: Content Task Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating Evidence-Based Instruction for Children with Asperger Syndrome

Ducharme

2013

Issues in Children's and Families' Lives

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Pretend play

Weisberg

2015

WIRES Cognitive Science

112

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Pretend play is a form of playful behavior that involves nonliteral action. Although on the surface this activity appears to be merely for fun, recent research has discovered that children's pretend play has connections to important cognitive and social skills, such as symbolic thinking, theory of mind, and counterfactual reasoning. The current article first defines pretend play and then reviews the arguments and evidence for these three connections. Pretend play has a nonliteral correspondence to reality, hence pretending may provide children with practice with navigating symbolic relationships, which may strengthen their language skills. Pretend play and theory of mind reasoning share a focus on others' mental states in order to correctly interpret their behavior, hence pretending and theory of mind may be mutually supportive in development. Pretend play and counterfactual reasoning both involve representing nonreal states of affairs, hence pretending may facilitate children's counterfactual abilities. These connections make pretend play an important phenomenon in cognitive science: Studying children's pretend play can provide insight into these other abilities and their developmental trajectories, and thereby into human cognitive architecture and its development.

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Impaired Competence for Pretense in Children with Autism: Exploring Potential Cognitive Predictors

Cited by 19 publications

References 28 publications

Theory of mind predominantly associated with the quality, not quantity, of pretend play in children with autism spectrum disorder

Theory of mind predominantly associated with the quality, not quantity, of pretend play in children with autism spectrum disorder

Evaluating Evidence-Based Instruction for Children with Asperger Syndrome

Pretend play

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