Brief report: new evidence for a social-specific imagination deficit in children with autism spectrum disorder.
Autistic kids may look uncreative on people tasks yet show normal imagination with objects.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked kids to draw two pictures: a person and a house.
They compared drawings from children with autism to drawings from neurotypical children.
The study looked only at imagination shown in the pictures, not artistic skill.
What they found
Children with autism drew less imaginative people.
Their house drawings looked the same as the neurotypical group.
The gap showed up only when the task involved social content.
How this fits with other research
Lim et al. (2008) saw the same person-drawing weakness years earlier in kids with Asperger’s.
Tonnsen et al. (2016) seemed to disagree: they found kids with autism could imagine when given a template.
The twist is task type: open-ended drawing hides imagination, while structured prompts reveal it.
King et al. (2014) moved from pictures to words and also found shorter, simpler made-up stories in autism, showing the social-imagination gap holds across formats.
Why it matters
When you test creativity, separate social and non-social tasks. A child who draws plain people may still invent wild machines or buildings. Use structured prompts or visual starters to unlock imagination that free drawing misses. This keeps you from labeling a child as “low creativity” when the issue is only social content.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Previous research suggests that children with autism have deficits in drawing imaginative content. However, these conclusions are largely based on tasks that require children to draw impossible persons, and performance on this task may be limited by social deficits. To determine the generality of the deficit in imagination in children with autism, we asked 25 children with autism (mean age 9;7) and 29 neurotypically developing children (mean age 8;7) to draw an imaginative person and house. Drawings of imaginary houses by children with autism did not differ from those by neurotypically developing controls, but drawings of persons were significantly less imaginative. These findings suggest that the impairment in imagination among children with autism may be specific to social stimuli.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2015 · doi:10.1007/s10803-014-2206-7