Memory and metamemory for actions in children with autism: Exploring global metacognitive judgements

Standards in education emphasize the role of metacognition in successful academic outcomes for those with and without learning challenges. Research into metamemory in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has produced mixed outcomes, with some studies finding children with ASD to have spared metacognitive accuracy and others finding it impaired. While most research has used item-by-item metamemory judgements, the novelty of the current study was to use global judgments-of-learning (global JOLs).

Twenty-three children with and twenty without ASD were presented with two lists of action words during a learning phase and were asked to either act out the words in a self-performed task or just listen to them being read aloud in a verbal task (control condition). Typically, self-performance produces memory benefits called the enactment effect. For both tasks, children also made pre-learning and post-learning global JOLs, stating how many words they thought they would recall.

Both groups demonstrated the enactment effect, but neither predicted its beneficial effect. Compared to controls, participants with ASD were found to be less accurate in predicting their future memory performance, specifically in the self-performed task. Both groups were comparable in terms of metacognitive monitoring.

Overall, the findings suggest that success or failure in metacognitive tasks in ASD might depend on task difficulty, and the type of metacognitive judgement used.