Foreword

Summary

Despite the fact that memory in people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has been researched for over fifty years, there has been very little in the way of attempts to synthesize or codify the findings. The two most notable such attempts are the seminal monographs Psychological Experiments with Autistic Children (Hermelin & O'Connor, 1970) and Seeing and Hearing and Space and Time (O'Connor & Hermelin, 1978), now over thirty years old. The period since the publication of these two books has seen considerable changes in the landscape of autism research, the most important of which have been an enlargement of the concept of ‘autism’ to encompass a spectrum of conditions that includes but is not limited to that first described by Kanner (1943), and the mushrooming of research into all aspects of the spectrum.

Memory research has grown in parallel with this general increase. One of us (JB) was heavily involved in the early phase of this growth, in particular developing the hypothesis that the patterning of memory functions, at least in lower-functioning individuals with ASD, had some parallels with that seen in the amnesic syndrome. This work continued into the 1980s but then diminished, partly because of the lack of a community of scholars interested in the topic, but also because memory was not seen as a particular problem in those high-functioning individuals who were becoming the main focus of research.