Experimental Studies On Temporally Extended Self-awareness In Children With Autistic Spectrum Disorders

Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction are one of the two core symptoms of children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD). Being the core of children’s social development, self-awareness provides the foundation for as well as affects the development of their social abilities. The results of the studies on children with ASD’s present self-one aspect of self-awareness-which began from the late1970s, indicated that children with ASD possess present self.To behavior appropriately, children need to be able to understand the relationship (such as chronological relationship, causality, etc.) between events happened in the time causal arrow. They must possess the ability to hold in mind, simultaneously, numerous conflicting representations of the same self, understand that the self continues to be the same self through time (i.e., the past, present, and future) and thus behave in ways that will produce desirable outcomes. Temporally extended self-awareness (TES) involves awareness of one’s physical self and continued existence through time. Several but limited researches have been done recently on TES in ASD children to investigate their social cognition.On the basis of reviewing the related references of temporally extended self-awareness of both typically developing children and children with ASD, using the design of series comparative experiments, the current thesis examined the development features and trends of ASD children’s TES and its influence factors to explore the possible reasons and interventional methods of ASD children’s social communication deficits.The main body of this research comprises two series of experiments:Series1:Experimental studies on temporally extended self-awareness in children with ASD, mental retardation, and typically developing children.There are3experients in this series: Experiment1:Delayed self-recognition task examExperiment2:Delayed self-recognition task exam under the delayed video object-trainingExperiment3:Delayed self-recognition task exam under the delayed self-image trainingSeries2:Experimental study on thought bubble false belief task in ASD Children, mental retardation children and normal children.The results indicate that:(1) ASD children’s TES is progressively developing from verbal mental age3to5. Comparatively, ASD children’s TES achieves its stability one year later than typically developing children.(2)"Delayed video object-training" and "Delayed self-image training" can facilitate the development of ASD children’s TES. Comparatively,"Delayed video object-training" works better than "Delayed self-image training" on children with ASD while the difference of effects of these two kinds of training on children with mental retardation and typically developing children are not found.(3) There is no significant correlation between children’s performance on TES and their meta-representation ability, which might indicates that the ability of meta-representation is not a necessity for the development of their TES.For knowing better and further on TES in Children with ASD, following researches can be conducted:lowing the age of and increasing the number of sample of children with ASD; using more advanced technology such as eye tracking to study ASD children’s TES; and examining the possible effective intervention approaches to improve the social competence of children with ASD by facilitating their development of TES.