A quantitative measure of JS’s memory

Abstract

JS is a highly able, well-educated 37 year old man with Asperger syndrome. A recent qualitative paper (Boucher, 2007) described his self-report of verbal and visual memory difficulties. The present paper used the WMS-III to compare the memory profile of JS to that of the adults with HFA in the Williams et al. (2005) WMS-III paper. Results show that JS’s self-report of his memory difficulties can by and large be supported, that JS’s memory performance is at the lower end of the group examined in the Williams et al. (2005) paper, and that, unlike the group profile in Williams et al. (2005), JS shows reduced performance on both verbal and visual measures of memory. A qualitative analysis of JS’s performance raises the possibility that JS is using language to retain details he can generalize over, as a compensatory strategy for some reductions in episodic memory.