Source Monitoring by Children with Autism

Byline: Annette Farrant (1), Mark Blades (2), Jill Boucher (1) Keywords: Autism; autistic; source monitoring; reality monitoring; memory Abstract: The term 'source monitoring' refers to the ability to distinguish the origins of memories. One type of source monitoring is reality monitoring--which means distinguishing internally and externally generated memories. This experiment examined reality monitoring by children with autism (with a mean mental age of 7 years 8 months). The children said several words and listened to another person say similar words. The children were then given a surprise memory test and asked to identify which words they had said and which the other person had said. The children with autism were compared to matched groups of normal children and children with mental retardation. There were no differences between the groups and, at least for this task, there was no evidence that children with autism have a deficit in their reality monitoring abilities. Author Affiliation: (1) Department of Human Communication, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S10 2TN, United Kingdom (2) Department of Psychology, University of Scheffield, Sheffield, S10 2TP, United Kingdom Article History: Registration Date: 29/09/2004