An Experimental Study On The Diachronic Thinking Of Children With Autistic Spectrum Disorders

Time information is an important medium for helping individuals to perceive the changes of surrounding things,the environment,or people.It is an important basis for people to predict the future.Children with autism spectrum disorders(ASDs),whose perceptions of time,especially high-level cognitive abilities impairments in diachronic thinking,make them less aware of the timing of events,and it is difficult to relate time to what is happening right now.This not only affects their academic performance in social interactions,but also makes them face many challenges in adapting to new and different stimuli and predicting future events.Diachronic thinking refers to the ability to help an individual to think about events in a time dimension and view events or phenomena in their everyday life from a developmental perspective.It can not only deepen individual daily thinking,but also broaden the their thinking,to help them find more ways to solve the problems.However,there has been considerable controversy over whether autistic children have the ability of diachronic thinking.The authors found that only a handful of researchers in the country mentioned the diachronic thinking ability of children with ASD.Previous researchers have focused more on their understanding of the low level of time-timing perception,such as time order,time span and piont.Compared with China,although Montangero led his team made a series of more in-depth researches on the diachronic thinking,it is mainly on typically developing children,less autistic children.In view of this,the study aims to explore the present status and characteristics of diachronic thinking of children with ASD,intellectual disability children(ID)and typically developing children(TD),to improve the mechanism of autistic children's time cognition,to detect the possible factors that influencing their development,and to find out the advantage and disadvantage of the autistic children's cognition of time so as to a better diagnosis,treatment and education of them.This study mainly discussed the present status and possible influencing factors of diachronic thinking ability of ASD children.It consists of two phases:The first phase is the experimental phase,which includes three experiments:tendency,transform,and synthesis.At this stage,30 children with autism were selected as the experimental group,30 children with intellectual disabilities and 32 typically development children as the control group.The hypothetical experimental paradigm was used to examine the diachronic thinking ability of the subjects respectively.The results showed that:1.Autistic children showed diachronic thinking ability,but their level of ability was significantly lower than that of typically development children;2.Both the nature of the stimuli materials and the time gradient affected the performance of the autistic children's diachronic thinking.On the sex materials and "month"dimensions,children with autism showed higher levels of diachronic thinking ability;3.ASD children responded to the effects of stimulated materials,task difficulty,and time gradients,but among the three types of subjects The shortest reaction time.The second phase is the verification phase,which mainly includes the experimental four-cross task comparison experiment.At this stage,the same subjects as those in stage one were selected and conducted in the form of semi-structured interviews.The results show that:1.There is a significant correlation between the results of Phase 1 and Experiment 4 and a certain predictability;2.Verbal and non-verbal abilities have an extremely significant impact on the development of autism children's diachronic thinking ability;There is a close connection between the components of the diachronic thinking ability,and the synthesis ability has a high predictability for the tendency and transform ability.Conclusions as follows:1.Children with autism have the ability of diachronic thinking;2.Compared with ID children and TD children,ASD children need improve to their diachronic thinking ability;3.The factors,such as the nature of stimulation materials and the time gradient will affect the performance of the autistic children's diachronic thinking ability;4.Tendency,transform and synthesis these three components of diachronic thinking have close relationship between each other.