Journal of Abnormal Psychology – Dr Martin Fracker

Do Autistic Individuals Have More Difficulty Remembering the Order of Non-Verbal Information?

Previous research had shown that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have more difficulty than others in remembering the order in which verbal information appeared such as, for example, the order in which one may pass through various cities on a road trip from Austin to Seattle. Bowler and colleagues wanted to see if this deficit in verbal serial recall would extend to non-verbal visual-spatial information, in this case the sequence of seven points which appeared on a map (a 3 x 4 grid) one point at a time. Participants had to recall the correct locations on the map in the exact order in which each point appeared.

These researchers found that, compared to neurotypical individuals, individuals with ASD had more difficulty remembering the order in which visual-spatial information appeared. Interestingly, their results also suggested that autistic individuals may use verbal strategies to remember non-verbal information.

How Does Autism Spectrum Disorder Affect a Person’s Memory?

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.

Can People Learn to Speak in Tongues?

The first time I ever heard anyone “speak in tongues”, defined as a seemingly miraculous occurrence of speaking in a language they had never learned, it did indeed appear miraculous as the person began speaking in tongues spontaneously with only minimal encouragement from others who were praying with them. That was in 1968 at Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church in Seattle. I was 15 years old.

Decades later, around 2003, I listened to a Pentecostal Catholic priest not just encouraging others to speak in tongues but actually instructing them in how to do it, and also modeling this behavior by speaking in tongues himself. This experience suggested that speaking in tongues (also known as glossolalia) may, at least in some cases, be a learned behavior. Motivated by this suggestion, I went searching for any scientific evidence one way or the other. Thus, I came upon this experiment confirming that speaking in tongues can indeed be learned.

This confirmation does not mean that all instances of speaking in tongues are learned of course. Some such instances could be miraculous: as far as I know, there is no way to prove they are not.