In this project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, Professor Heather Ferguson and colleagues examine the understanding of counterfactual events in individuals with ASD. The findings have important implications for research and educators.
More about Professor Heather Ferguson
About
Context is of vital importance in everyday communication and interactors have to constantly update their current knowledge in order to let an interaction run smoothly. This process is impaired in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In this four-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, Professor Ferguson and colleagues investigate the cognitive processes that underlie these impairments in individuals with ASD.
This project examines the understanding of counterfactual events, which are hypothetical events that are counter to reality (e.g. ‘If I had won the lottery’). Specifically, the study will investigate two important factors that are likely to influence one’s ability to think counterfactually – imagination and self-representation – and assess how they relate to the ability to understand other people’s thoughts (so-called “mindreading”), which is also impaired in ASD.
Research questions
- Whether the ease with which one can imagine a counterfactual proposition influences understanding of reality in ASD.
- How individuals with ASD represent the self in (counterfactual) narratives. Self-representation is known to be impaired in ASD. Thus we predict that when counterfactual narratives are related to/about oneself, understanding will be enhanced in typically developing participants, but relatively more impaired among participants with ASD.
- How self-representation and the ability to imagine events interact to influence understanding of a counterfactual event.
Programme and methodology
- Participants were adults with and without ASD.
- The primary research method of this project was eye-tracking.
- Participants eye movements were recorded during tasks in which participants read sentences presenting counterfactual and factual events (e.g. If Joanne had remembered her umbrella, her hair would have been dry/wet when she arrived home).
Findings
The findings of this project have so far shown that the ability to understand counterfactual events seems unimpaired in individuals with ASD.
Related publications
- Barzy, M., Ferguson, H. J., Williams, D., & Black, J. (under review). Adults with and without autism anticipate and integrate meaning based on the speaker’s voice: Evidence from eye-tracking and event-related potentials. Preprint available at: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/g362
- Black, J., Barzy, M., Williams, D., & Ferguson, H.J. (2019). Intact counterfactual emotion processing in autism spectrum disorder: Evidence from eye-tracking. Autism Research, 12, 422-444. *Awarded $1,000 OSF pre-registration challenge prize
- Ferguson, H.J., Black, J., & Williams, D. (2019). Distinguishing reality from fantasy in adults with autism spectrum disorder: Evidence from eye movements and reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 106, 95-107.
- Black, J., Williams, D., & Ferguson, H.J. (2018). Imagining Counterfactual Worlds in Autism Spectrum Disorder. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 44, 1444-1463.
- Ferguson, H.J. (2019). Counterfactuals. In Cummings, C. & Katsos, N. (Eds.), Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics, Oxford University Press.
Impact
This project offers new information on counterfactual thinking, which seems relatively unimpaired in adults with ASD. Previous work with children did find impairments in counterfactual thinking, and the current project demonstrates that by adulthood, individuals with ASD perform comparable to typically developing adults on counterfactual thinking tasks.
Within education, it is important for the wellbeing and development of individuals with ASD not to assume that impairments are insurmountable. For many processes, it might be the case that development in protracted. Patience and support within educational setting can encourage individuals with ASD to develop and thrive.