Drawing the answers: Sketching to support free and probed recall by child witnesses and victims with autism spectrum disorder.
Handing autistic kids a pencil during recall raises accuracy and lowers errors.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Jackman et al. (2018) asked autistic and neurotypical children to remember a staged event. Half of each group talked only. The other half talked while drawing quick sketches.
The team then counted correct details and wrong details in every child's story.
What they found
Both groups gave more correct details when they sketched. The boost was biggest for the autistic children.
Sketching also cut the number of wrong details autistic kids added, bringing their accuracy close to typical levels.
How this fits with other research
Matson et al. (2013) saw no recall gain for autistic adults under standard questions. Age matters: kids seem to gain more from drawing than adults do.
Hilton et al. (2010) found that the full cognitive interview hurts autistic adult accuracy. Sketching, in contrast, is a light, single-step aid that helps rather than harms.
Hsu et al. (2017) also boosted autistic children's memory by swapping the human interviewer for an avatar. Both studies show simple supports can level the recall field.
Why it matters
If you interview autistic youth about behavior episodes, let them draw while they talk. Provide plain paper and a pencil, invite them to 'show what happened,' and keep questions open. This quick step can raise accuracy without extra training or tech.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The success of witness interviews in the criminal justice system depends on the accuracy of information obtained, which is a function of both amount and quality of information. Attempts to enhance witness retrieval such as mental reinstatement of context have been designed with typically developed adults in mind. In this article, the relative benefits of mental and sketch reinstatement mnemonics are explored with both typically developing children and children with autism. Children watched a crime event video, and their retrieval of event information was examined in free and probed recall phases of a cognitive interview. As expected, typically developing children recalled more correct information of all types than children with autism during free and probed recall phases. Sketching during free recall was more beneficial for both groups in both phases in reducing the amount of incorrect items, but the relative effect of sketching on enhancing retrieval accuracy was greater for children with autism. The results indicate the benefits of choosing retrieval mnemonics that are sensitive to the specific impairments of autistic individuals and suggest that retrieval accuracy during interviews can be enhanced, in some cases to the same level as that of typically developing individuals.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2018 · doi:10.1177/1362361316669088