WORKING-MEMORY IN CHILDREN WITH AUTISM AND WITH MODERATE LEARNING-DIFFICULTIES

We asked whether children with autism are specifically impaired on tes ts of working memory. Experiment 1 showed that children with autism we re at least as likely as normal children to employ articulatory rehear sal (criterion: evincing the ''word length effect'') and that they had superior spans to that of children with moderate learning difficultie s. In Experiment 2, participants were given ''capacity tasks'' in orde r to examine group differences in the capacity of the central executiv e of working memory. The performance of the children with autism was i nferior to that of the normally developing group and similar to that o f the children with moderate learning difficulties. Copyright (C) 1996 Association for Child Psychology and Psychiatry.