Recall readiness in children with autism.
Young autistic children often think they have studied enough when they have not—verify readiness before testing recall.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Feldman et al. (1999) asked kids to study picture sets until they felt ready for a perfect recall test.
They compared children with autism and mental retardation to typically developing kids matched on mental age.
The task measured recall readiness: could each child stop studying at the right moment?
What they found
Children with autism and mental retardation stopped studying too soon.
They thought they were ready, but later recalled fewer pictures than the comparison group.
Their mental age was about seven years, yet they misjudged how much study time they needed.
How this fits with other research
Elmose et al. (2014) conceptually replicated the question with older autistic kids and found no group difference in metacognitive accuracy. The shift from pictures to words and the older age may explain the null result.
Wojcik et al. (2014) extended the work to adolescents and showed intact judgments-of-learning. Older autistic students accurately decided when they had studied enough and adjusted their time accordingly.
Bromley et al. (1998) preceded the target and already flagged a monitoring impairment in autism. Kids failed to spot and correct their own errors, foreshadowing the recall-readiness problem.
Why it matters
If you teach autistic children with a mental age under eight, do not trust their 'I'm ready' signal. Build in quick pre-tests or teacher checks before independent recall tasks. Fade supports only after data show consistent accuracy.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
When people are asked to learn information they need to judge when they have encoded the information accurately and will be able to retrieve it correctly. Making such a judgment is an aspect of metacognitive ability, and is referred to as "recall readiness." Previous researchers have not considered recall readiness in children with autism, therefore we asked matched groups of children with autism, children with mental retardation, and normally developing children (mean mental age: 7 years) to study several pictures of objects until they felt ready to recall all the objects without error. Their recall was then tested. The children with autism and the children with mental retardation had impaired recall readiness compared to the normally developing children. We discuss this result with reference to other research into the metacognitive abilities of children with autism.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1999 · doi:10.1023/a:1023074726548