Supporting autistic adults' episodic memory recall in interviews: The role of executive functions, theory of mind, and language abilities.
Jade Eloise Norris, Katie Maras
PMID 34243676WHAT IT FOUND
Supportive questioning removed the link between interview performance and cognitive abilities for autistic adults.
When questions were open-ended, expressive language predicted recall specificity. With specific prompts, no cognitive factor predicted performance, suggesting support reduces the mental load of interviewing.
Key findings
01For autistic adults, expressive language ability predicted the specificity of their recall only when questions were unsupportive; this link disappeared when supportive prompts were used.
02Supportive questioning eliminated significant predictors of recall specificity for both autistic and non-autistic adults, indicating that structured prompts reduce the reliance on executive functions, theory of mind, or language skills.
03In mock employment interviews, no cognitive measure predicted the quality of responses for either group, regardless of whether questions were supportive or unsupportive.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample size for the employment interview study was small (18 autistic, 15 non-autistic), limiting the power to detect predictors of interview quality. The 'unsupportive' conditions in these studies may have already been somewhat supportive compared to real-world open-ended questioning, potentially masking the true effect of cognitive load. The study did not analyse gender differences, which are known to influence autobiographical memory recall.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. The work was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK).
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that supportive questioning improves the actual accuracy of the memory recalled. The study shows it removes the dependence on cognitive abilities for performance, but it does not prove that the memories reported are more factually correct than those reported under unsupportive conditions.