Asperger Syndrome and Schizophrenia: A Comparative Neuropsychological Study.

Carbó-Carreté et al. (2016) gave a full IQ test and a set of memory and speed tasks to the adults with Asperger syndrome and the adults with schizophrenia. They wanted to see which thinking skills were strong or weak in each group.

All volunteers were outpatients, and spoke the same language. The team scored every test the same way so they could line up the profiles side-by-side.

The Asperger group scored higher on overall IQ, but both groups stumbled on working memory and processing speed tasks. In plain words, they could solve hard puzzles yet lost track of short instructions or worked slowly under time pressure.

The schizophrenia group also showed wider gaps between their highest and lowest sub-test scores, while the Asperger profile was more even.

Bast et al. (2022) saw the same memory drag in autistic adults, but they used pupil size instead of paper tests. Their eye-tracking data confirm that memory encoding is shaky in this population, even when IQ is average or better.

Jackson et al. (2025) found a two-way street: poor working memory predicted later anxiety in youth with Down syndrome, and anxiety also hurt later memory. Maria’s adults were not tested for anxiety, so the new link gives you a reason to add an anxiety screener when you see memory problems.

Gabriels et al. (2001) looked at adults who had both mild intellectual disability and schizophrenia. They reported smaller limbic brain structures linked to past meningitis or other early injuries. Maria’s schizophrenia group did not have ID, so the papers do not clash—they simply map different slices of the schizophrenia spectrum.

If you test an adult with Asperger syndrome, do not let a strong IQ score fool you—check working memory and processing speed separately. Add brief anxiety and mood screens, because later work shows these can erode the same weak skills. When you write supports, build in extra wait time, repeat directions in chunks, and teach note-taking hacks to offload working memory.