Russell J, Jarrold C, Henry L
Department of Experimental Psychology, Cambridge University, U.K.
J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 1996 Sep;37(6):673-86. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.1996.tb01459.x.
We asked whether children with autism are specifically impaired on tests of working memory. Experiment 1 showed that children with autism were at least as likely as normal children to employ articulatory rehearsal (criterion: evincing the "word length effect") and that they had superior spans to that of children with moderate learning difficulties. In Experiment 2, participants were given "capacity tasks" in order to examine group differences in the capacity of the central executive of working memory. The performance of the children with autism was inferior to that of the normally developing group and similar to that of the children with moderate learning difficulties.
我们探究了患有自闭症的儿童在工作记忆测试中是否存在特定缺陷。实验1表明，患有自闭症的儿童运用言语复述的可能性至少与正常儿童相同（标准：表现出“词长效应”），并且他们的记忆广度优于中度学习困难儿童。在实验2中，参与者被给予“容量任务”，以检验工作记忆中央执行系统容量的组间差异。患有自闭症的儿童的表现不如正常发育组，与中度学习困难儿童的表现相似。
