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Patterns of Autobiographical Memory in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Abstract

Two studies are presented that explored the effects of experimental manipulations on the quality and accessibility of autobiographical memories in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), relative to a typical comparison group matched for age, gender and IQ. Both studies found that the adults with ASD generated fewer specific memories than the comparison group, and took significantly longer to do so. Despite this, experimental manipulations affected two indices of autobiographical memory (specificity and retrieval latency) similarly in both groups. These results suggest that adults with ASD experience a quantitative reduction in the speed and specificity of autobiographical memory retrieval, but that when they do retrieve these memories, they do so in a way that is qualitatively similar to that of typical adults.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all those who participated in this research, as well as Professor Tony Charman and the two anonymous reviewers of this paper for their helpful and insightful comments on the manuscript. We would also like to thank Susannah Gilmour for her assistance in coding the data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, UK

    Laura Crane, Linda Pring, Kaylee Jukes & Lorna Goddard

  2. London South Bank University, Southwark, London, UK

    Laura Crane

Authors
  1. Laura Crane
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  2. Linda Pring
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  3. Kaylee Jukes
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  4. Lorna Goddard
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Laura Crane.

Additional information

Study Two was conducted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of a doctoral degree by the first author, with support of a 1 + 3 PhD studentship from the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), ref. PTA-030-2005-00091.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 6 below.

Table 6 Memory cues in the odour, image and word and the auditory, image and word conditions (Study Two)
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Crane, L., Pring, L., Jukes, K. et al. Patterns of Autobiographical Memory in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord 42, 2100–2112 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-012-1459-2

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