Working Memory in Children with Autism and with Moderate Learning Difficulties

Abstract

We asked whether children with autism are specifically impaired on tests of working memory. Experiment 1 showed that children with autism were at least as likely as normal children to employ articulatory rehearsal (criterion: evincing the "word length effect") and that they had superior spans to that of children with moderate learning difficulties. In Experiment 2, participants were given "capacity tasks" in order to examine group differences in the capacity of the central executive of working memory. The performance of the children with autism was inferior to that of the normally developing group and similar to that of the children with moderate learning difficulties.

Strategic verbal rehearsal in adolescents with mild intellectual disabilities: A multi-centre European study

“…A consistent finding is their impaired immediate verbal serial recall (Henry & MacLean, 2002;Henry & Winfield, 2010;Hulme & Mackenzie, 1992;Russell, Jarrold, & Henry, 1996;Schuchardt, Gebhardt, & Mähler, 2010;Van der Molen, Van Luit, Jongmans, & Van der Molen, 2007). This is found with chronological age-matched peers, but, more significantly, with mental age (MA) matched peers (e.g., Henry & MacLean, 2002;Henry & Winfield, 2010;Hulme & Mackenzie, 1992;Russell et al, 1996).…”

“…The current findings, therefore, provide new evidence regarding strategic behaviour and word length effects in adolescents with mild ID, supporting a 'developmental' perspective (Zigler & Balla, 1982) that at least some aspects of verbal strategy development proceed in line with mental age. Importantly, the current findings were not subject to the potentially confounding effects of verbal output at recall or auditory presentation (e.g., Poloczek et al, 2014;Russell et al, 1996).…”

“…Previous findings suggest a deficit in individuals with ID compared to MA comparisons (e.g., Henry & MacLean, 2002;Henry & Winfield, 2010;Hulme & Mackenzie, 1992;Russell et al, 1996; but also see Conners, Carr, & Willis, 1998;Hasselhorn & Mähler, 2007;Jarrold & Baddeley, 1997), consequently group differences in the baseline span might have been expected. We failed to detect a significant group difference; this could be due to similar REHEARSAL IN ADOLESCENTS WITH ID 21 verbal STM abilities in both groups or because the two memory tasks involve different abilities (storage versus storage + recoding).…”

“…Cowan et al (1992) and Henry (1991) have argued that the process of verbal recall, particularly if it follows auditory presentation of a list, produces word length effects, because the recall requires a recitation of the output list and there is more decay in the time-limited phonological store of long named items (see Henry, 2012). Russell et al (1996) addressed these issues by asking children to point to pictures of items on a response board, instead of verbally recalling items as in previous experiments.…”

Strengths and weaknesses in executive functioning in children with intellectual disability

“…Brown, 1974;Connors et al, 1998;Henry & MacLean, 2002;Henry & Winfield, 2010;Mähler et al, 2009). Yet some inconsistency in the literature is also apparent: a few authors have reported that children with ID perform more poorly than MA comparisons (Russell et al, 1996;van der Molen et al, 2009). With respect to verbal fluency, Conners et al (1998) found no differences in performance between children with ID and MA comparisons on a letter fluency task; similarly, Henry (2010) found no group differences using a category fluency task.…”