Memory for actions in children with autism: self versus other

In order to ask whether autism is associated with difficulty in self-monitoring we gave a group of children and adolescents with autism a task in which they themselves had to remember whether they or another person had performed certain actions. In our first experiment, three groups of participants had to recall whether placements of picture cards had been made by themselves or by the experimenter. The participants with autism performed at a much lower level than the two comparison groups and, unlike the comparison groups, were not better at recalling their own placements. A second experiment tested the prediction arising from the monitoring-deficit account that the children with autism would be unimpaired when the placement of the items did not alternate between self and other. This prediction was confirmed moderately well. Additionally, in contrast to that of the comparison groups, the performance of the participants with autism was unaffected by whether self or other displaced the items. This is consistent with the existence of a monitoring deficit.