Further evidence of preserved priming and impaired recall in adults with Asperger's syndrome.
Adults with Asperger’s keep hidden memory skills but add false details when they try to recall events out loud.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tested the adults with Asperger’s and 24 typical adults.
Each person saw word lists under two rules.
One rule said ‘remember these later.’ The other rule said ‘just read.’
After each list they did a surprise recall test and a quick priming task.
What they found
Both groups remembered the same number of correct words.
The Asperger group, however, added extra words that were never on the list.
Their priming scores stayed normal, showing hidden memory was intact.
How this fits with other research
Stancliffe et al. (2007) later showed that even after teaching memory tricks, adults with Asperger’s still recalled fewer words. That finding extends today’s result: the extra intrusions we see here are part of a deeper planning problem, not simple forgetting.
Matson et al. (1994) saw no priming in adults with mild intellectual disability, while our Asperger sample primed normally. The contrast tells us preserved automatic memory is specific to autism, not general to all developmental conditions.
Daoust et al. (2008) found poorer dream recall in ASD adults. Together the papers paint a picture: free-form recall is fragile in autism, whether the topic is word lists, dreams, or daily events.
Why it matters
When you ask a client with Asperger’s to describe what happened, expect the facts to be mostly right but watch for added details. Write key points down in front of them and review the list together. This simple step lowers intrusion errors and keeps therapy records accurate.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Two experiments compared incidental (implicit) and intentional (explicit) memory performance in adults with Asperger's syndrome and individually matched controls. Experiment 1 involved perceptual tests using word fragment cues, following study tasks in which the participants either generated the words from contextual cues or read the words alone, with no contextual cues. Experiment 2 involved conceptual tests using paired associate cues, following study tasks in which the paired associates were rated either for their relatedness or for their readability. Performance in both the incidental tests was similar for both groups. Performance in both the intentional tests was also similar for both groups, with one exception. The adults with Asperger's syndrome were more likely to falsely recall words that had not actually been studied. These findings further delimit the nature of memory impairments in adults with Asperger's syndrome, which seem restricted to certain aspects of episodic memory that include the tendency to make more intrusion errors in recall.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2003 · doi:10.1023/a:1024450416355