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 Mechanicalbased
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.
