OtherAutism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research2018

Visual Motion Prediction and Verbal False Memory Performance in Autistic Children.

Furtuna G Tewolde, Dorothy V M Bishop, Catherine Manning

PMID 29271070

WHAT IT FOUND

Autistic children predicted hidden moving events as well as typically developing children.

Their verbal false memory performance did not clearly differ. This does not support a general prediction impairment in autism.

Key findings

01Children with autism and typically developing children did not differ in how consistently they predicted when a hidden car or filling grid would finish.

02Both groups falsely recognized strongly related words that had not been read, and the groups did not differ clearly in rejecting them.

03Children who were better at telling real words from false words were also more consistent in the visual prediction tasks, the opposite of the expected link.

STILL TO COME

How it was doneWhat they found

Read the rest of this summary

You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.

Already have one?

What it does not show

The visual tasks were simple, predictable and supported by a track or grid, so they do not show whether autistic children predict complex, weakly linked or everyday events. The sample was limited to children with IQ above 70 and normal or corrected vision, so the results may not apply to autistic children with lower intellectual ability or visual impairment. The autistic group had lower verbal IQ than the comparison group, which could influence verbal false memory comparisons. The false memory group difference was unclear, and the study may have been too small to settle it if the real difference is smaller than the one it was planned to detect. The link between visual prediction and false memory was exploratory and opposite to the expected direction.

Declared interests

No author conflict declaration is provided in the supplied text. The metadata lists non-U.S. government research support.

The easy way to misread this

Do not conclude that autistic children have no prediction difficulties. The tasks used simple, predictable motion with visual supports, so they do not test complex, weakly linked or social prediction.

Read it on PubMed →


The study

Participants
30 typically developing and 30 autistic children
Certainty of evidence
Low

Browse

    Cite

    Furtuna G Tewolde, Dorothy V M Bishop, Catherine Manning Visual Motion Prediction and Verbal False Memory Performance in Autistic Children. Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research. 2018.

    Read the original