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Children with autism create imaginary friends like typically developing children

Contrary to popular belief, research findings showed that children with autism spectrum disorders have the ability to create and play with imaginary friends.

Although significantly fewer children with autism created imaginary companions compared with typically developing children, there was no difference in the quality of the play, according to the results.

"The finding that children diagnosed with ASD even spontaneously create such imaginary companions refutes existing beliefs that they are not imagining in the same way as typically developing children," Paige E. Davis, PhD, of the department of psychology, University of Huddersfield, England, said in a press release. "Imaginary companions are special because they are social in nature, and children with autism have issues with social development and communication. So, if you are actually creating a mind for an imaginary person you are involving yourself in a range of social activities that the autism diagnosis itself would say you couldn't do."

In their study, researchers assessed whether children with autism spontaneously created their own imaginary friends, and whether the form of imaginary friend (invisible or personified in an object) or the complexity of its characterization differed between ASD and typically developing children. They also investigated whether the groups differed regarding function of the imaginary friend or the age at which they created them. Parents of children with ASD aged 2 to 8 years (n = 111) and parents of typically developing children (n = 104) completed questionnaires to provide information on their child’s educational environment, diagnosis, functioning and imaginary friend(s).

The investigators found that 16.2% of children with ASD had created imaginary friends compared with 45.2% in the typically developing group. Specifically, 38.8% of the imaginary companions created by children with ASD were invisible and 61.1% were personified in an object like a stuffed toy or doll, and 70.2% of the imaginary companions created by typically developing children were invisible and 29.8% were personified in an object.

Although creating imaginary friends was significantly less common in the ASD group than in the typically developing group, there were no significant differences in social attributions nor in children’s functional use of their friend for social or comfort purposes. However, parents of children with autism were less likely than parents of typically developing children to indicate that their children had created an imaginary companion, and when they did notice imaginary friend play, it was when their child was older than typically developing parents’ children, according to the researchers.

“Broadly, our results confirm much of the research on deficits in ASD children’s spontaneous imagination behavior,” Davis and colleagues wrote in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. “However, the similarities identified between the [imaginary companions] of [typically developing] children and those with ASD who had created [imaginary companions] suggest that differences between [typically developing] and ASD children on this specific high-level imaginative behavior may be quantitative rather than qualitative.” – by Savannah Demko

Disclosures: Davis reports no relevant financial disclosures. Please see the full study for all other authors’ relevant disclosures.