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By 6 years of age, typically developing children demonstrate superior recall/recognition of self-performed, as opposed to other-performed, actions (Baker-Ward et al., 1989; Roberts & Blades, 1998). This performance advantage, associated with being a participating agent rather than an observer, is known as the “enactment effect” (Engelkamp, 1998) and is thought to be related to developments in self-awareness and/or action monitoring. It has been argued that ASD involves primary impairments in both of these areas. If individuals with ASD have difficulty in monitoring their own actions (Russell, 1997) they may fail to encode motor information into their memory traces, thereby eliminating the enactment effect. Furthermore, if individuals with ASD have insufficiently developed representations of self (Frith & Happé, 1999; Hobson, 1993) they may be less able to encode information in relation to this structure. Both of these accounts predict that individuals with ASD will be less subject to the enactment effect in memory tasks.
Objectives:
To test the prediction that individuals with ASD show a reduction in the enactment effect, in order to assess the claims that individuals with ASD show impaired self-awareness and action monitoring abilities.
Methods:
Thirty-six children with ASD and 36 comparison children, matched on age and verbal ability, completed a self-other source monitoring task. The procedure involved participant and experimenter taking turns to pick up and name a series of picture cards. Both item recognition and source memory were assessed.
Results:
Contrary to predictions, both the ASD and comparison groups demonstrated the enactment effect in both item and source memory.
Conclusions:
These results appear to speak against the theory that ASD involves an impairment in self-monitoring and/or self-awareness. However, it is possible that the enactment effect is due to alternative underlying factors.