The Memory Profiles in Children and Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Memory profiles in individuals that have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been studied and monitored for decades. Memory has been categorized as both the fundamental cognitive area principally accountable for the experimental symptoms of autism spectrum disorder or as inferior to a widespread cognitive discrepancy that goes beyond memory, such as executive dysfunction. Recent models have suggested that the memory abnormalities are an indication of core deficits in executive function (Bennetto, Pennington, & Rogers, 1996; Russell, Jarrold, & Henry, 1996). No concurrence has been decided concerning the role of memory functioning in individuals with ASD.
Variation in results has always created problems in autism research. This dilemma is linked to the high occurrence of inconsistency in individuals with ASD, which is the consequence of developmental variations and disparities in cognitive levels between research groups. Conversely, a multitude of the results have been duplicated across studies suggesting that they are distinctive of memory function in ASD individuals (Williams et al., 2006).
This paper examines the memory profiles in children and adults with autism spectrum disorder.
Literature Review
Mcleod (2007) defines memory as the structures and procedures included in the storage and later retrieval of information. Evidence hints that the predominant coding technique in short term memory (STM) is acoustic coding. The principle encoding system in long term memory (LTM) seems to be semantic coding (by meaning). However, information in LTM can also be coded both visually and sound-related (Mcleod, 2007).
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a disability that can make developing major social, communication, ...

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Southwick, J. S., Bigler, E. D., Froehlich, A., DuBray, M. B., Alexander, A. L., Lange, N., & Lainhart, J. E. (2011). Memory functioning in children and adolescents with autism. Neuropsychology, 25(6), 702-710. doi:10.1037/a0024935
Williams, D. L., Goldstein, G., & Minshew, N. J. (2005). Impaired memory for faces and social scenes in autism: clinical implications of memory dysfunction. Archives Of Clinical Neuropsychology, 20(1), 1-15. doi:10.1016/j.acn.2002.08.001
Williams, D. L., Goldstein, G., & Minshew, N. J. (2006). The Profile of Memory Function in Children With Autism. Neuropsychology, 20(1), 21–29. doi: 10.1037/0894-4105.20.1.21
Wojcik, D. Z., Moulin, C. A., & Souchay, C. (2013). Metamemory in children with autism: Exploring “feeling-of-knowing” in episodic and semantic memory. Neuropsychology, 27(1), 19-27. doi:10.1037/a0030526

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