Development of Planning in Children with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders and/or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.
Pure autism shows a lifelong shallow search pattern that global planning scores can miss.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tested the kids . Each child had high-functioning autism, ADHD, both, or neither.
Kids played a computer tower puzzle. The game counted how many moves they planned ahead and how long they thought before acting.
What they found
Children with autism plus ADHD started slow but caught up by age 12. Their final scores looked normal.
Kids with autism only never grew out of one flaw: they quit searching the move tree too early, no matter how old they were. ADHD kids rushed the clock instead.
How this fits with other research
Baker et al. (2025) later showed the same ASD+ADHD group has the most real-world injuries. Poor planning depth may explain why they walk into danger.
Spriggs et al. (2016) flipped the age lens: older adults with autism feel executive problems every day even when tower scores look fine. Together the papers warn that global accuracy can hide lifelong rigidity.
Petrolo et al. (2025) review adds that early executive gaps in preschoolers predict later social trouble. Starting search-depth training before school could head off both safety and social risks.
Why it matters
Stop relying on pass-fail tower scores. Count how deep the child explores options. If search stops at two moves, teach branching routines like verbal self-prompts or graphic organizers. Target this in kids with pure ASD; the mixed ASD+ADHD group may need impulse control instead.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Planning impairment is often observed in children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASD), but attempts to differentiate planning in ASD from children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and typically developing children (TD) have yielded inconsistent results. This study examined differences between these groups by focusing on development and analyzing performance in searching ahead several steps ("search depth") in addition to commonly used global performance measures in planning. A cross-sectional consecutive sample of 83 male patients (6-13 years), subgrouped as ASD without (ASD-, n = 18) or with comorbid ADHD (ASD+, n = 23), ADHD only (n = 42) and n = 42 TD children (6-13 years) were tested with the Tower-of-London-task. For global performance, ASD+ showed the lowest accuracy in younger children, but similar performance as TD at older ages, suggesting delayed development. Typically, a prolongation of planning time with increasing problem difficulty is observed in older children as compared to younger children. Here, this was most pronounced in ASD-, but under-expressed in ADHD. In contrast to global performance, effects of search depth were independent of age. ASD-, but not ASD+, showed increased susceptibility to raised demands on mentally searching ahead, along with the longest planning times. Thus, examining both global and search depth performance across ages revealed discernible patterns of planning between groups. Notably, the potentially detrimental impact of two diagnosed disorders does not add up in ASD+ in this task. Rather, our results suggest paradoxical enhancement of performance, ostensibly attributable to disruption of behavioral rigidity through increased impulsivity, which did not take place in ASD-. Autism Res 2016, 9: 739-751. © 2015 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2016 · doi:10.1002/aur.1574