Just got my copy of Your Autism Magazine Spring 2014, which has an article about research on visual memory "Back to the future" p10. This is research at Durham University looking at memory and future thinking in people with autism.
I would like to have seen the full paper but the link would only allow free access to Issue 1 for 2013, which didn't contain the paper.
What puzzled me hugely is that they compared the verbally expressed recollections of a shopping trip or "standing by a small stream deep in a forest" or a personal experience in the future.
They found that intellectually able "adults with autism gave significantly less rich and detailed descriptions of remembered and imagined events and fictitious scenes than neurotypical adults".
This astounded me because I've read so much about the vividness of pictorial memory reported by many adults with autism. The results of the research, amongst other things, concludes that adults wuith autism have difficulty creating scenes in their minds - more fuel to the "lacks imagination" lobby.
They did give the same level of description of scenes in a wordless picture book as NTs, so they are suggesting the memory problemn is not down to language differences, or difficulties piecing together information.
But hold it.....what about socialising differences? NTs connect their memories with shared social experiences, especially with regard to shopping trips! An adult with autism is unlikely to create a mental image for social reasons, and may not as readily see the need to create a fictitious image.
OK so I haven't seen the full research, and NAS could only do a page with a big photo on the research.
But I do come across a lot of research on autism, along similar lines, which fails to take account of the social input. People with autism may not have the same need to describe an imagined scene to others.
Most academic research requires a considerable amount of thought to be given to influencing factors. It seems to be a constant failing of psychology and psychiatry research, which uses one or two rather glib checked for contributions from other variables. And they often use small study populations, like 5-10 subjects (individuals), where other disciplines would test 100 or 300 subjects or more.
It just doesn't ring true to me that adults with autism would significantly lack visual memory.
