Metamemory in children with autism spectrum disorder

ASD is a neurodevelopmental disorder which primarily affects social interaction and communication. However, a growing literature has also identified some episodic memory difficulties in this group (e.g.: free recall, autobiographical memory, recollection). A plausible reason ·for this is that people with ASD lack the metacognitive mechanisms necessary for efficient memory. Hitherto, few studies have assessed metamemory (awareness of one's own memory) in ASD. The novelty of the current thesis was thus to compare performance of children with ASD to typically developing children on metacognitive monitoring (estimation of future memory performance) and control (manipulation of memory strategies) as well as metamemory knowledge about the variables affecting memory in online memory tasks. To investigate monitoring; global (judgment-of-Iearning & judgments-of-confidence) and item-by- item (judgments-of-Iearning & feeling-of-knowing) metacognitive judgments were used. Control was explored using recall readiness paradigm. The usage offeedback from monitoring to apply memory strategies (study time allocation & item selection) was further investigated. No group differences were found neither on global (Experiment 3.1, 3.2 & 4.2) nor item-by- item (Experiment 4.1 & 4.3) metacognitive monitoring at encoding (Judgment-of-Iearning). '. ' .. ~ However, the ASD group showed deficits in monitoring at retrieval (Feeling-of-knowing) in an episodic (but not a semantic) task. Children with ASD were also unimpaired on measure of control (Experiment 4.2) and on responding to feedback from monitoring (Experiment 4.3). Finally, the results showed spared knowledge in this clinical group regarding the effects of different learning conditions, such as self-enactment (Chapter 3), varying study time and item difficulty (Chapter 4). Overall the current thesis showed very specific metacognitve difficulties in ASD. These deficits are discussed in terms of mnemonic cues that these children can and cannot use to form their judgments. The involvement of retrieval of partial information (potentially reliant on recollection) and cues regarding the self are proposed as potential causes of these monitoring difficulties .EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo