If you know an individual with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), you may have noticed that they may be very good at remembering certain kinds of things such as calendar dates. There have been many studies examining how ASD may affect a person’s memory, but the results have been complex and difficult to explain. Poirier and colleagues decided to look more closely at how working memory (also known as “short-term memory”) may differ between ASD and neurotypical individuals. In three experiments, they had ASD and neurotypical individuals perform variations of a verbal serial recall task.
These researchers found that individuals with ASD could remember the verbal items just as well as neurotypical individuals but they had more trouble remembering the order in which the verbal information appeared.
Abstract
Three experiments examined verbal short-term memory in comparison and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) participants. Experiment 1 involved forward and backward digit recall. Experiment 2 used a standard immediate serial recall task where, contrary to the digit-span task, items (words) were not repeated from list to list. Hence, this task called more heavily on item memory. Experiment 3 tested short-term order memory with an order recognition test: Each word list was repeated with or without the position of 2 adjacent items swapped. The ASD group showed poorer performance in all 3 experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that group differences were due to memory for the order of the items, not to memory for the items themselves. Confirming these findings, the results of Experiment 3 showed that the ASD group had more difficulty detecting a change in the temporal sequence of the items.abstract goes here
Citation
Poirier, M., Martin, J. S., Gaigg, S. B., & Bowler, D. M. (2011). Short-term memory in autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 120(1), 247–252.
Dr Martin Fracker 