Memory, Learning, and Language in Autism
This research strand examines how autistic people process, store, and use information across different contexts — with a particular focus on implicit learning, episodic memory, and the balance between procedural and declarative systems. Building on work from Boucher & Anns (2018) and Anns et al. (2020), it explores how autistic cognition often follows distinct pathways for understanding and integrating experience, especially when tasks rely on flexible recall, inference, or the rapid integration of multiple information sources.
Findings from this programme show that autistic learners may lean more on structured, procedural, or pattern-based learning, and may experience increased cognitive load when faced with complex, multi-step, or inference-heavy information. These insights have quietly shaped the direction of several later projects. They underpin the conceptual foundations of the ALEQ by illuminating why particular academic demands — recall-heavy lectures, high-ambiguity tasks, rapid information flow, or unpredictable teaching formats — can create barriers for autistic students. Understanding the interplay between memory systems, sensory load, language processing, and cognitive control has allowed the ALEQ to map academic experiences with a level of nuance that reflects real cognitive mechanisms, not stereotypes.
The same theoretical grounding extends to applied work beyond education — including the study on autistic adults’ comprehension of the UK Police Caution. Here, the memory-and-learning research helps explain why the caution’s high linguistic complexity, ambiguity, syntactic density, and rapid verbal delivery create disproportionate difficulty. The project draws on this cognitive framework to assess how autistic and non-autistic adults interpret legal rights under pressure and whether different delivery formats alter comprehension.
Together, these strands form a cohesive research programme: from foundational cognitive theory, to learning in higher education, to high-stakes real-world settings such as policing. Each project builds on the same core question — how autistic people understand and work with information — while extending it into new environments where clarity, load, and cognitive style profoundly matter.