Examining the Roles of Retrieval Practice and Post-Retrieval Feedback in Learning Among Autistic Adults.

Diagnosis was self-reported via an online platform rather than clinically verified, so group comparisons rest on self-identification. The sample was predominantly Caucasian and college-educated, with a narrow age range (18–35), limiting generalizability to autistic adults with higher support needs or different educational backgrounds. The task was a simple word-pair associative memory task completed online without supervision, so the findings may not extend to more complex language, social, or vocational learning contexts. The experiments were conducted online with no experimenter present, leaving open the possibility of undisclosed use of external memory aids despite honesty statements and data screening.

Funded by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation's New Investigators Grant and the Louisiana Board of Regents. The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Do not assume these results apply to autistic adults with higher support needs or to complex language and communication goals. The study used simple word-pair tasks completed online by a sample that was mostly college-educated and Caucasian, and autism diagnosis was self-reported rather than clinically verified. The authors themselves note that future work should test these strategies in autistic learners with higher support needs.