Research Project - Autism, Aspergers, and Creativity

            For this research paper I decided to look into Autism and Asperger Syndrome and it’s effect on creativity and imagination. I found a paper written by Jaime Craig and Simon Baron-Cohen that was published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders in 1999. Their paper states that research on the matter of a lack of creativity of people with autism or AS has had little research attention.

            To test the children with autism or AS they had them take the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, which is “one of the most popular and frequently used procedures for assessing creative thinking”. They had four different groups of children to take the test to give somewhat of a control to the tests. The first group was children with autism, the second had AS, the third had moderate learning difficulties, and the fourth was a group of normally developing children.

           

For the first experiment, it comprised of two different parts. For the first they were given a paper with 30 different lines and they were asked to make as many different pictures as they could with it and they were given no time limit, so they could go on until they could not come up with any more “completely different” pictures. For the second, they were given ten different incomplete figures or squiggles and then asked to do the same as with the first test. For these tests autism and the AS group scored a lot lower than the other two groups. The autistic group scored low on both tests, but the AS group did only bad on the first test.

           

For the second experiment they wanted to test them on their reality-based and imaginative creativity. For this experiment the groups were given a stuffed elephant toy and were told to come up with new ways to make the toy more fun. They then were scored based on their answers and whether they were more realistic or imaginative. For this experiment the results concluded once again that the children with autism and the children with AS came up with less imaginative things and were able to come up with fewer responses as well.

           

For the third and final experiment was to test and measure verbal fluency, semantic fluency, and design fluency. For this experiment the children were given a 3-D foam shape and were then asked to come up with as many ideas of what that it could be. As with the other experiments, the children with autism and the children with AS both produced fewer responses.

           

Overall for all of the experiments the conclusion was the same in that the children with autism or AS came up with fewer responses than the children with moderate learning disabilities and the normally developing children. So as with what I thought, the children while still being able to be creative and imaginative, they were not able to come up with as many responses as the control groups. 

The only problem I found with this test was that while it did answer the question of who could come up with more answers, it didn’t measure the levels of creativity.

Reference: http://autismresearchcentre.com/docs/papers/1999_Craig_BC.pdf