What is working memory like in students with Autistic Spectrum Disoder (ASD)? Let’s first look at verbal short-term memory skills in high functioning ASD students. Their skills in this area can vary, in some cases, students can have above average short-term memory, while others perform at the same level of a student with language impairments. In my own research, I found that high functioning teenagers display a verbal short-term memory problem . The type of material they have to remember provides us with a clue to their memory profile. They struggle in particular with abstract information like nonsense words or new vocabulary. Why? The strategy they use to remember can over-burden them. Studies confirm that even high functioning individuals do not use their long-term memory or visual strategies to support immediate recall. Instead, they rehearse things over and over again to prevent forgetting. While this can be useful in remembering short sequences of information, it is ultimately a time-consuming and inefficient strategy to simply keep repeating things.
Now let’s look at their working memory profile. The majority of individuals with ASD do not have deficits in this area. In visual working memory tasks, they are shown a matrix with dots that appear in random locations and have to recall their location in backwards sequence. Both my own research as well as other studies confirms that their performance is similar to their same-aged typically developing peers, and those with the same IQ level. In the classroom, this means that they won’t have any difficulty with remembering information that is visually presented. The problem arises when they have to use their eyes to track the movements of a teacher as part of a lesson. Even high functioning individuals have trouble shifting their gaze from one thing to another and may misidentify the relevant information to focus on. Remember that one feature of ASD is their ability to concentrate on one thing at a time. In the classroom, they can find it distracting to shift their visual attention from the board to the teacher talking and back again, and as a result struggle to remember the lesson even if it is presented visually.
Verbal working memory is not impaired in individuals with ASD. Students who are low functioning can perform lower than their same-age peers but when they are compared with peers with the same IQ levels, their verbal working memory performance is similar. In some cases, psychologists have observed weaknesses in verbal working memory. However, this is likely the result of having to visually scan material to pick out the relevant information, rather than a working memory deficit per se. Studies of brain activity reveal a very interesting pattern. When a child with ASD is presented with two tasks and has to focus on one while ignoring the other distracting task, their brain activity reveals that they do not actually shift their attention to the more important information. They have a difficult time determining what information is important. In the classroom, some students with ASD might appear to struggle with certain memory-heavy activities. However, this may be connected to their difficulty in knowing what they should focus on, rather than poor working memory.
*Alloway et al (2009). Journal of Learning Disabilities READ
Did you every play Marco Polo as a child? I used to love closing my eyes and spinning around faster and faster when I was ‘It’. Now imagine playing that game in the middle of a busy intersection. Cars are honking, dogs are barking, siren sounds get closer, and people are yelling. You are ‘It’ and are trying to listen to the where ‘Polo’ is coming from. For a student that is hypersensitive to sound, touch, and light, the world is a chaotic place. As a result, new surroundings can be very disorienting for them. Some label such sensory hypersensitivity as sensory integration dysfunction (SID).
The label of sensory integration disorder may come as a welcome relief to some parents who want an explanation for why their child has not reached certain milestones, like walking or talking. As parents, it is instinctive to worry that something may be wrong with our child. We view Bobby obsessively lining up cars in a row as a symptom of Autistic Spectrum, and Daisy mixing up words as dyslexic. Yet, does a label like SID actually help parents? Although it is a ‘condition’ identified by some health practitioners, there are many psychologists and neurologists who think that the label of SID is actually doing a disservice to parents. I will outline several reasons for why this is the case. The first issue is that the difficulties associated with SID reflect a neurodevelopmental immaturity, rather than a distinct disorder. The absence of adults receiving a diagnosis of SID begs the question of whether in some cases, the child might outgrow the symptoms naturally without the need for expensive and unproven treatments. The next point is related to this issue as sensory hypersensitivity is a symptom of other disorders such as dyspraxia, ADHD, and Autistic Spectrum. A label of SID might falsely lead to parent to feel comforted that their child is receiving support, when more serious problems might be going undiagnosed, and as a result, untreated or supported. Finally, there are very few published clinical trials on either the diagnosis of SID or the treatment of it. Those that are published have been criticized as flawed research, due to small samples and heterogeneous samples (ie, including students with ADHD, ASD, in the sample). It appears then while the symptoms of SID are indeed real, they can point to more serious disorders which merit diagnosis and treatment.
Is there a Rain Main hiding in us all? Scientists have used special technology to temporarily immobilize part of the brain in healthy adults. The volunteers showed incredible skills similar to autistic savants, such as naming the day when given a date in history (calendar calculating) and drawing abilities.
An autistic savant is someone who is autistic with a special skill, usually related to memory. For example, they might be able to draw an accurate replication of a scene or location after looking at it for just a few minutes. Another example is an amazing ability to perform complicated maths problems in their head or tell you what day it was on 25 February 1869. A child who has savant abilities would be drawing three-dimensional pictures while their friends are scribbling. They might be able put together a jigsaw puzzle that adults struggle doing, without even looking at the picture. Their exceptional memory helps them to recognize patterns in things that would take us ages to figure out.
In an odd twist of nature, autistic savants have such specialized skills because part of their brain is damaged: the left hemisphere that deals with language and processing information. This damage leads to learning disabilities and difficulty coping in everyday situations. To deal with this damage, their right side of the brain is unlocked, resulting in a ‘spotlight’ on one of the five senses. If there is a spotlight on hearing, then the autistic savant has amazing musical skills.
