Pretend play not possible for kids with asperger?

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Thanks btbnnyr! My son is a bizarre case, he has good joint attention and ToM but has always lacked speech and pretend play (both spontaneous and prompted). He only copies (mimics) what he finds interesting.

His neuropsychologists refuses to label him as autistic because of his joint attention, and uses "NVLD" Instead. His "play" is very stereotyped, loves to grab leaves from the ground or collect tiny magnets. He never understood the concept of symbolic nor pretend play.

But you're talking about combining bits of knowledge. Being an orphan, and sword fighting for example. Or generalizing from being a tiger to reacting to situations as a tiger perhaps is something you could do.

These weren't things I could do.

I'm not just saying no knowledge. I'm saying I could have a lot of knowledge about tigers, but if I didn't know exactly how a tiger would react in every specific situations (which I couldn't as a human and not a tiger), I couldn't generalize to how a tiger would react in the situations presented to me.

I couldn't combine the idea of sword fighting and being an orphan. I could play house - I could pretend to cook - because I knew how to pretend to cook, I knew all the steps for that.

I could only mimic something I had all the information about how to do. I couldn't generalize into other types of pretend play. I couldn't go into a fantasy world, because I couldn't create a fantasy world. If others did, I couldn't figure out what would happen.

So what I'd do for "pretend play" was generally act out scenes from books I'd read, because people I knew wanted to do that style of play.

But I still have no issues with suspending disbelief and I grew up with my books.

Much of pretend play is not making things up by self or being creative, but more like imitation of activities seen and heard in eberryday life, or roleplaying characters not created by self, like cartoon characters, and acting out scenes from books would be pretend play too.

I didn't do this kind of play at all, the kind involving characters and scenes and plots. I was completely unaware of the whole concept, and I noticed not at all other children doing these things around me all the time in preschool and daycare.

The play that I did was entirely arranging objects, and that's what I did until late childhood, when I finally started to develop some theory of mind.

I don't think that lack of pretend play affected my imagination at all, as I have a good one as adult and people have called me queen of making stuff up.

I forgot, besides arranging objects, my other play was jumping up and down on the bed.

It's bizarre that neuropsychs would label him NVLD.

Early Social Attention Impairments in Autism: Social Orienting, Joint Attention, and Attention to Distress.
By Dawson, Geraldine; Toth, Karen; Abbott, Robert; Osterling, Julie; Munson, Jeff; Estes, Annette; Liaw, Jane
Developmental Psychology, Vol 40(2), Mar 2004, 271-283.
Abstract
This study investigated social attention impairments in autism (social orienting, joint attention, and attention to another's distress) and their relations to language ability. Three- to four-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 72), 3- to 4-year-old developmentally delayed children (n = 34), and 12- to 46-month-old typically developing children (n = 39), matched on mental age, were compared on measures of social orienting, joint attention, and attention to another's distress. Children with autism performed significantly worse than the comparison groups in all of these domains. Combined impairments in joint attention and social orienting were found to best distinguish young children with ASD from those without ASD. Structural equation modeling indicated that joint attention was the best predictor of concurrent language ability. Social orienting and attention to distress were indirectly related to language through their relations with joint attention. These results help to clarify the nature of social attention impairments in autism, offer clues to developmental mechanisms, and suggest targets for early intervention.

There is lots of literature on joint attention in autism, but young autistic children are impaired in it compared to developmentally delayed children.

A lot of ABA therapists are obsessed with teaching autistic children to pretend play. I'm glad that they didn't get their dirty dolls on my awesome autistic dirt piles.

I don't get it either, honestly...

My son is almost 6 and still can't point. Whenever he sees a plane in the sky, he would show it to me with the hand open. It's like he doesn't understand the index finger pointing towards something. I think he's autistic, not just developmentally delayed.

It's nice to hear you used to play just like my son, btbnnyr He likes to teach himself colours and textures, and loves to arrange everything in patterns. He's so smart and full of ideas... Sadly his teachers think he's academically very impaired, specially because he's not verbal and not very fond of PECS

hmm. i spent most of my childhood in my own imaginary world. i don't know that i was all that great at letting other children into that world... but i certainly had one.

There is new study about social cognition in autism as measured by Sally Anne task, eggsept task is called Dot Midge task and gives autistic children reason and motivation to use explicit social cognition in competitive game to get reward, while Sally Anne task lacks reward or reason to engage explicit social cognition, but instead requires spontaneous implicit social cognition to even get to the level of using explicit social cognition to answer correctly, and I failed as adult due to low implicit social cognition even preventing me that using explicit social cognition, which if only I had remembered to remember to use, then I would have answered correctly.

Anyway, here is abstract, and I am posting here, because here is where I posted other abstracts already.

This makes sense to me, as I know that I lack motivation (implicit) to do the mentalizing (explicit for me) needed to answer the question, and lack of mentalizing means that I answer where the marble is, not where anyone thinks it is. In eye-tracking study, NTs looked more where Sally would look (taking Sally's perspective automatically), while autistic adults who passed test looked equally between two locations (not automatically taking one perspective).

However, if I were child, I think that I would have failed Dot-Midge task too, because I didn't understand rewards either.

I didn't play with other kids when I was little,I pretended I was a horse and just ran around in circles.Or played with cars.I did find a friend when I was about six,but we played side by side and he sucked his shirt and I played with my hair.We played with cars mostly.And if we both got excited we both jumped up and down and squealed.I loved to color but I had to peel all the crayons because I could not stand the feel of the paper.I liked to stack blocks also.

I loved pretending I was a horse.

I would play with kids a few years younger than me.

I would get them to create their own nation states, get them to design army equipment, and warplanes for their particular countries, and I would supervise entire world wars against a common imaginary enemy country (kinda of a cross between the Middle Earth and the real world war two).

I had a rich imagination as a child and would sit alone and disappear into my mind.
Playing with others I did, but it was more of a directorial role and didn't last long. I was hopeless at interaction as a child.
Now, at 43, I still have a rich fantasy life and I hate role playing. Sometimes in jobs I've had we've had to pretend to be customer and clerk and I just found it so ridiculous that I had a silly smile on my face the whole time.

No. There are many aspies who are not only capable of this but enjoy it. There are so many criteria that fit us into the Spectrum. This "inability to pretend" is a false one.

This seems to be kind of debunked. Wonder why it's on the aspie screening tests then. I found it really hard to assess my imagination and play mostly cause I couldn't think of what was normal and what was abnormal. Really didn't make much sense to me.

Seems more like a personality thing than something that would necessarily point you either lower or higher on the autism scale.

Yeah, I think the people who make the tests should visit WP and then rethink how they test.

It depends on what you call "pretend play." I have never been able to role play, but I was able to pretend that my spaceship was flying on it's own, and could shoot down other space ships.

That is kind of ridiculous. They want you to see things from the customer's viewpoint, thinking that will make you a better employee? Forcing such things often has the opposite effect.