Memory for actions in autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

This study explored how memory for actions in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing children might benefit from self-performance and experimenter demonstration, and whether these groups possess metamemory knowledge of their performance levels in this task. Children with autism were less accurate on the action memory task when they carried out each action themselves during encoding, or when no actions were implemented during this phase, but this difference was abolished when the experimenter demonstrated each action during encoding. Despite clear difficulties in the self-performed condition relative to typical children, the group with ASD also showed a beneficial effect of performing the actions themselves during instruction. Finally, children with autism were as accurate as typical children in judging the accuracy of their own memory performance, indicating an absence of metamemory difficulties for this task.

Keywords:

• Autism
• Metamemory
• Action memory

Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported by grant funding from Remedi to Céline Souchay and Charity Brown. We thank Stewart O'Callaghan for his help with data collection for this project.

Notes

¹This task can be differentiated from the paradigms typically used in the SPT literature in two ways. First, it assesses memory accuracy using action performance whereas SPT studies generally measure verbal recall. Second, as a working memory task it features relatively short sequences of instructions and minimal delay between presentation and test, in contrast to the longer sets of instructions commonly used in the SPT literature. Nevertheless, we predict SPT and EPT effects to emerge in this measure.