Memory and metamemory for actions in children with autism: Exploring global metacognitive judgements.
Kids with autism gain the same memory boost from acting words out, yet underestimate that boost—consider explicit metacognitive prompts before enactment tasks.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Wojcik et al. (2022) asked kids to act out simple words like "jump" or "clap."
Some kids had autism, some did not.
After acting, each child guessed how many words they would later remember.
Then they took a memory test to see what they really recalled.
What they found
Both groups remembered more acted words than spoken words.
Kids with autism guessed they would recall fewer acted words than they actually did.
Their memory worked fine, but their prediction was off.
How this fits with other research
Doenyas et al. (2019) saw a similar blind spot. Their kids with autism could do a timing task yet failed to notice their own errors.
Sasson et al. (2018) found the pattern in adults. Adults with autism misjudged how others would rate their personality.
All three studies show the same thread: people with autism can perform a task, yet their self-prediction is shaky.
Simó-Pinatella et al. (2013) looked at a different memory job—remembering to do something later. They linked poor time-based memory to weak theory-of-mind. Zofia’s work adds a new piece: the weakness shows up even when kids simply guess how well they will remember actions they just did.
Why it matters
When you use enactment to teach vocabulary, safety steps, or social scripts, add a quick self-rating. Ask, "How many do you think you’ll remember?" Then show them the real score. Over several trials this builds calibrates their metacognition and may boost study choices.
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Join Free →After a role-play lesson, have each child predict how many actions they will recall, then test and graph the result together.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Standards in education emphasize the role of metacognition in successful academic outcomes for those with and without learning challenges. Research into metamemory in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has produced mixed outcomes, with some studies finding children with ASD to have spared metacognitive accuracy and others finding it impaired. While most research has used item-by-item metamemory judgements, the novelty of the current study was to use global judgments-of-learning (global JOLs). METHOD: Twenty-three children with and twenty without ASD were presented with two lists of action words during a learning phase and were asked to either act out the words in a self-performed task or just listen to them being read aloud in a verbal task (control condition). Typically, self-performance produces memory benefits called the enactment effect. For both tasks, children also made pre-learning and post-learning global JOLs, stating how many words they thought they would recall. RESULTS: Both groups demonstrated the enactment effect, but neither predicted its beneficial effect. Compared to controls, participants with ASD were found to be less accurate in predicting their future memory performance, specifically in the self-performed task. Both groups were comparable in terms of metacognitive monitoring. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, the findings suggest that success or failure in metacognitive tasks in ASD might depend on task difficulty, and the type of metacognitive judgement used.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2022 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2022.104195