Assessing recollection and familiarity in autistic spectrum disorders: methods and findings.

Bigham et al. (2010) built three new tasks to pull apart two kinds of memory in autism. One task asks, "Did you see this shape before?" Another asks, "Where on the screen did it appear?" The third asks, "What action went with it?" Each task targets either recollection (full scene replay) or familiarity (gut feeling of oldness).

The team wrote the how-to guide only. They did not run a full experiment or report scores. Their goal was to give clinicians tools that are autism-friendly and easy to score.

The paper presents the tasks, not the results. No data table, no graphs, no winners or losers. Think of it as a new ruler that has marks but has not measured anything yet.

Ni Chuileann et al. (2013) took the same ruler and tried it on kids who speak little or not at all. They kept the shape and action parts but swapped spoken answers for pointing. This direct replication shows the tasks can bend to fit low-functioning autism without breaking the logic.

Boucher (1981) and Pilgrim et al. (2000) looked older and saw memory holes: autistic kids recalled less of their own day and mixed up who did what. Sally's new jobs zoom in smaller. Instead of asking "What did you do yesterday?" they ask "Was this shape on the left or right?" The older gap stays real, but the new tools let us see which step—recollection or familiarity—slips first.

Gras-Vincendon et al. (2007) seems to disagree. They found typical temporal memory in high-functioning autism using a simple "Which came first?" test. The clash is only on the surface. Agnès used an automatic, quick judgment; Sally's source task forces conscious recall. The papers together say: timing feel can be intact, yet placing an item in its full scene may still falter.

If a learner can flag a photo as "old" but cannot say where or when it showed up, you know familiarity is on but recollection is weak. Use that cue to teach note-taking, visual timelines, or rehearsal scripts instead of more drills of "see, stare, remember." The tasks are free, short, and need only a laptop—easy Monday morning pilots while you wait for fuller data.