Abstract
This study analyzed the relation between mental time travel (MTT) and the ability to produce a storytelling focusing on global coherence, which is one of the most notable characteristics of narrative discourse. As global coherence is strictly tied to the temporal sequence of the events narrated in a story, we hypothesized that the construction of coherent narratives would rely on the ability to mentally navigate in time. To test such a hypothesis, we investigated the relation between one component of MTT—namely, episodic future thinking (EFT)—and narrative production skills by comparing the narratives uttered by 66 children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with those produced by 66 children with typical development. EFT was assessed by administering a task with minimal narrative demands, whereas storytelling production skills were assessed by administering two narrative production tasks that required children to generate future or past episodes with respect to the target stimuli. The results showed that EFT skills were impaired only in a subgroup of children with ASD and that such subgroup performed significantly worse on the narrative production task than ASD participants with high EFT skills and participants with typical development. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
Highlights
The ability to tell stories is a species-specific feature of human beings. Niles (1999) defined individuals of our species as Homo narrans
From an empirical point of view, our aim was to investigate the role of mental time travel (MTT) in narrative by analyzing storytelling in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in social communication and interaction, along with restricted repetitive interests and behaviors (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013)
We aimed to verify (1) whether impairments of episodic future thinking (EFT) could be identified in a large cohort of children with high functioning ASD using a task with minimal narrative demands, such as the Picture Book Trip task adapted from Atance and Meltzoff (2005) and (2) whether impairments in EFT affect narrative generation skills in children with ASD
Summary
The ability to tell stories is a species-specific feature of human beings. Niles (1999) defined individuals of our species as Homo narrans. The ability to tell stories is a species-specific feature of human beings. Niles (1999) defined individuals of our species as Homo narrans. 107) maintained that “if there is anything that defines our species as unique. It is the telling of stories, and the invention of language as the means of doing so”. According to several scholars, the ability to tell stories represents the evolutionary adaptation that distinguishes humans from other animals (Sugiyama, 2001; Thompson, 2010; McBride, 2014; Adornetti, 2015; Ferretti, 2016; Corballis, 2017; Ferretti et al, 2017). Defining what characterizes a narrative is a matter of controversy. There is a general agreement on the fact that narratives do imply a reference to sequences of events in time (Scalise-Sugiyama, 2005). We focused on a specific property of narrative and on a specific
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