Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Telling Time is A Difficulty

Most people know that keeping the attention of a child with autism spectrum disorder or ASD is quite a challenge in and of itself. What people may not know is that tasks such as telling time can also be quite tricky for them as well. This could potentially mean that they do not know when to stop whatever it is they are doing.

According to an article on Spectrum News, children should get better at telling time with age. This is because they would normally have a lot of different life experiences by then, such as trips to the store, talks with loads of different, and even going to school in order to take different classes. On the large part, these types of experiences are a luxury to children with ASD,

Due to the fact that children with ASD have an adamant desire to keep a strict routine, they may not be able to experience different things, let alone differentiate them. They have trouble telling how much time has happened in between two certain events. This was proven to be true in a study by a group of researchers from University College London.

Their study involved asking a control group and a group of children with autism how much time there is in between three flashes of a green circle. They found that the children with ASD lost track at an earlier round compared to the control group of children without autism spectrum disorder.

This is believed to be caused by the children with ASD generalizing how much time there is in between flashes after a few rounds even though it actually takes a little longer after each. This may also be due to the fact that they have trouble using their prior knowledge to "fine tune" sensory signals to certain stimuli such as sight and sound.