The Role of Relational Processing at Study – A brief report
Jennifer Murphy, Eri Ichijo, Geoffrey Bird & Lauren Cooper (2025)
doi.org/10.1007/s10803-025-06803-1
This study looked at how autistic adults form false memories—when someone remembers something that didn’t actually happen. They wanted to find out if autistic people are more or less likely to make false memories compared to non-autistic people, and what might explain any differences.
They used a well-known memory test (called the Deese-Roediger-McDermott task – a name which is quite hard to remember). In this test, people study lists of related words that suggest a missing word (called a ‘critical lure’). A list of words starting with bed – rest – awake – tired – dream, might make you think of the lure word ‘sleep’, even when it’s not there.
Participants then did three tasks:
- A memory test to see if they falsely remembered the lure word.
- A word-completion task to test for unconscious memory of the lure word.
- A word-association task to see how they link ideas when thinking freely.
Autistic and non-autistic adults were just as likely to falsely remember the missing word and to mention it when freely thinking of related words. However, autistic adults were less likely to show unconscious memory of the missing word in the word-completion task.
This suggests that autistic adults may think about word meanings in a more deliberate, less automatic way. This helps us understand more about how memory works in autism.