Metacognitive Monitoring and Control of Eyewitness Memory Reports in Autism

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., fineor coarse-grained). In Phase 2, participants answered the same questions but provided both a fineand 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.

The Witness-Aimed First Account (WAFA): A new technique for interviewing autistic witnesses and victims

“…It is worth noting, however, that while WAFA increased the amount of correct details they reported, autistic witnesses nevertheless recalled fewer correct details overall compared to TD witnesses, even with the WAFA technique. Disentangling whether this reflected poorer memory for the event per se or simply a reduced ability or inclination to report details is beyond the scope of the current study, but this is an important question for future research in order to inform further developments to interview techniques (see Maras et al, 2020 , for further discussion on this issue). Future studies should also compare the WAFA technique directly with the CI to establish whether it might generally be superior for both autistic and TD witnesses, or whether it primarily supports autistic witnesses relatively more effectively when compared to the alternative CI technique.…”

Intact selective attention supports context memory in adults with autism spectrum disorder

“…Further, our task asks participants to make judgments of confidence (JOC) at retrieval for both attended and unattended contexts. Metamemory is still an understudied area in ASD research and, to our knowledge, this is only the second to explore retrospective memory confidence for contextual-level details in adults with ASD 52 and the first that uses metad' which separates response biases from sensitivity unlike commonly used Gamma correlations. When metacognitive differences have been seen in ASD compared to neurotypical controls, results suggest diminished confidence-accuracy correspondence [40][41][42]44,46 which has also been seen in healthy aging [53][54][55] .…”

Peer Review #1 of "Registered report: investigating a preference for certainty in conversation among autistic adults compared to dyslexic adults and the general population (v0.1)"

“…This could be due to possible difficulties around metacognition in autistic people, who may experience a mismatch between performance and confidence in their performance due to differences in self-monitoring. There is evidence that autistic people may show such a mismatch (Grainger et al, 2016;Nicolson et al, 2019) although there is some concern about the replicability of these results (Maras et al, 2020).…”