Personality traits, autobiographical memory and knowledge of self and others: A comparative study in young people with autism spectrum disorder.
Autistic teens store fewer trait words and thinner life stories, making it hard to know or describe who they are.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Robinson et al. (2017) compared autistic and neurotypical teens. They asked each teen to list personality traits that describe themselves and a close peer.
Next, the teens told two short life stories. One story had to show a trait in action. The other story had to include sights, sounds, and feelings.
Last, the teens answered questions like 'How do you know you are kind?' and 'What might your friend think about you?'
What they found
Autistic teens named fewer self traits. Their traits were also more vague ('nice') than specific ('I share my notes').
Their life stories held less sensory detail and less emotion. They struggled to explain how a past event proved a trait.
When asked about their own minds, they gave short, general answers. They were less sure what others might think of them.
How this fits with other research
The result lines up with Berna et al. (2016). That survey showed people with high autistic traits have fuzzy self-concepts because they cannot pull meaning from past events.
It also extends Farley et al. (2010). That study found autistic teens already lacked 'agency' self-concept. Sally shows the memory roots of that gap.
Godfrey et al. (2023) looked at the same teens six years later. Autistic adults kept losing story details over time and still skipped the 'main theme' trick typical adults use. Together the papers trace a steady self-memory decline that starts in adolescence and continues without support.
Why it matters
If a client cannot recall specific moments, self-advocacy lessons stay abstract. Start sessions by jointly building a 'memory bank'. Record short videos of the client helping, leading, or fixing a problem. Label each clip with one clear trait word. Re-watch before social-skills practice so the teen has concrete evidence of 'I am helpful' or 'I can lead'. Over time, prompt them to tell the story to a peer without the video. This gives them the rich detail they need to know, and explain, who they are.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The relationship between dissociable components of autobiographical memory (e.g. semantic personality traits and episodic memory retrieval) and other cognitive skills that are proposed to enable one to develop a sense of self (e.g. introspection) have not previously been explored for children with autism spectrum disorder. This study compared autobiographical memory (semantic and episodic) and knowledge of self (internal/external self-knowledge and introspection/mentalising abilities) in children (aged 11-18 years) with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder and typically developing controls (total N = 48). Novel and standard tasks were employed. Compared to typically developing controls, young people with autism spectrum disorder had autobiographical memory difficulties that were characterised by a reduction in the retrieval of semantic personality traits, with more initial prompts required to facilitate episodic memory retrieval and fewer episodic memories containing emotional and sensory information. Knowledge of the self and others was also impaired, with reduced introspection and poorer mentalising abilities. Young people with autism spectrum disorder were also identified as presenting with an atypical relationship between autobiographical memory and self-knowledge, which was significantly different from typically developing controls. Test performance is discussed in relation to the functions of autobiographical memory, with consideration of how these cognitive difficulties may contribute to clinical practices and the social and behavioural characteristics of autism spectrum disorder.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2017 · doi:10.1177/1362361316645429