Metacognitive Monitoring and Control of Eyewitness Memory Reports in Autism.
Autistic witnesses are as accurate and self-aware as anyone else, but social questioning can freeze their ability to update answers.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Maras et al. (2020) asked autistic and neurotypical adults to watch a short crime video.
Later each person answered questions about what they saw and rated how sure they were about every answer.
Some questions were asked by a live person; others appeared on a computer screen.
What they found
Both groups got about the same number of answers right.
Both groups were equally good at knowing when they were right or wrong.
The only hitch: autistic participants had trouble changing their answers when a person asked the questions, not when the computer did.
How this fits with other research
The result lines up with McGarty et al. (2018) and Elmose et al. (2014), who also found no big metacognition gaps between autistic and typical peers.
It also agrees with Wojcik et al. (2014), showing autistic teens can judge their own learning just fine.
Looks like Bromley et al. (1998) disagrees; they claimed autistic kids can’t monitor errors. The gap is about task, not truth: kids vs adults, action vs memory, visible vs verbal.
Why it matters
If you interview an autistic client, deliver questions in writing or record them ahead of time. Skip rapid face-to-face grilling. The person likely knows what they know; social pressure just blocks their ability to revise.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Providing eyewitness testimony involves monitoring one's memory to provide a detailed and accurate account: reporting details likely to be accurate and withholding potentially inaccurate details. Autistic individuals reportedly experience difficulties in both retrieving episodic memories and monitoring their accuracy, which has important implications for eyewitness testimony. Thirty autistic and 33 IQ-matched typically developing (TD) participants viewed a video of a mock bank robbery followed by three phases of questions (with judgments of confidence). In Phase 1, participants freely generated the granularity of their responses (i.e., fine- or coarse-grained). In Phase 2, participants answered the same questions but provided both a fine- and a coarse-grained answer. In Phase 3, participants were instructed to maximize accuracy over informativeness by selecting one of their Phase 2 answers as their final answer. They either received the questions socially (from the experimenter) or answered them online. There were no group differences in accuracy or metacognitive monitoring, with both autistic and TD witnesses demonstrating: (a) a strong preference for reporting fine-grained details at the expense of accuracy; (b) improved though still suboptimal grain size reporting when instructed to maximize accuracy over informativeness; (c) effective accuracy monitoring; and (d) higher overall accuracy when questions were delivered socially. There was, however, a subtle difference in metacognitive control, with autistic witnesses performing more poorly than TD witnesses when questions were delivered socially, but not when they were delivered online. These findings contrast with evidence suggesting that autism is marked by impairments in episodic memory and metacognitive monitoring and control. Autism Res 2020, 13: 2017-2029. © 2020 The Authors. Autism Research published by International Society for Autism Research published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Autistic people have been reported to experience subtle difficulties in monitoring and regulating their information reporting, which has important implications for providing eyewitness testimony. We found that autistic witnesses' testimony comprised a similar level of detail and accuracy as non-autistic witnesses' accounts. However, autistic people found it difficult to optimize their testimony when the questions were delivered socially-but not when they answered the questions online. © 2020 The Authors. Autism Research published by International Society for Autism Research published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2020 · doi:10.1080/09658211.2011.590506