We have recently launched our new video series which aims to explain our research projects in less than five minutes! Our first video discusses Dr Eilidh Cage’s recent paper with collaborators from Royal Holloway and UCL on camouflaging and stigma. You can watch the video on YouTube below:

This video was created by Lauren Paterson, a MSc placement student. We’ll be sharing more of our videos each month, so stay tuned for more! And, if you have any feedback about our videos, please email us at autismresearch@stir.ac.uk 

Recently, Lauren Paterson completed a 10-week placement with STAR as part of her MSc at the University of Stirling. While many of our placement students assist with our research projects, this year we tried a new placement which involved supporting the STAR team with our social media and public engagement activities – something we want to do lots more of! In this blog, Lauren reflects on her time with STAR.

My name is Lauren Paterson, and I am a student at the University of Stirling undertaking a Psychology (Conversion) MSc course. This course stood out amongst others due to the placement opportunity it provided, as it was important for me to gain practical skills and knowledge within Psychology and make an impact. I sought and secured a placement with Stirling Autism Research, as a Communications Assistant, beginning my placement in April.

While I had witnessed the strengths and challenges for an autistic family member throughout their education and into employment, I had no knowledge of what constituted autism research and community issues before I started this placement. What immediately struck me as I began my placement was my lack of awareness of basic autism knowledge and terminology, such as the general preference for identity-first language. Although I was very new to autism research when I started this placement, I was pleased to find that many autism research articles catered to non-experts, providing lay overviews below the abstract. While I found most articles to be accessible, at times I was overwhelmed by the contentious nature of topics spanning terminology to autism research conventions. Grasping these divisive topics was a steep learning curve, however, I was grateful to have been exposed to these controversies that I would have been otherwise ignorant to, and became passionate about spreading awareness and being a more effective supporter of autistic people.

As a Communications Assistant at STAR, I worked alongside Dr Eilidh Cage developing Twitter schedules, blog posts and YouTube videos. Over my 10-week placement, we were able to increase traffic across STAR social media accounts, and I am happy with the progress we have made and especially proud to have created accessible content that can hopefully reach many different people, through our series of digestible video summaries of STAR research articles. You can check out the first video I made here, and more will be released on the STAR YouTube channel in the months to come!

I am very grateful for the support of Dr Eilidh Cage and Dr Monique Botha throughout this placement, I have learnt so much that I can take with me and apply in the future. I will be very sad to leave STAR however, I am proud to played a small part in the important work they do in order to foster a more inclusive and accepting society for neurodivergent people.

We are delighted to announce that Dr Monique Botha has been awarded an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. The Fellowship will enable Monique to work on a significant piece of work for three years (starting later this year) at Stirling. The research project is called “Fragile Knowledge: Dehumanisation & Interpretation Bias in Autism Research”. Monique plans to investigate the role autism researchers play in the construction of autism knowledge. The project will use both textual analysis of existing literature, and experiments with autism researchers. Currently, there are many issues in autism research, such as the dehumanisation of autistic people, and Monique’s project will be one of the first to systematically examine these issues. The Fellowship will also give Monique the opportunity to foster collaborations and visit other researchers around the world (hopefully!). The project will have wide-reaching implications for ethical practices in autism research, and psychology as a discipline more broadly. Congratulations, Monique!

Background:

In everyday life, we often need to ‘remember-to-remember’ to do activities in the future (prospective memory). Some of these tasks need to be carried out at a specific time (time-based prospective memory). Because prospective memory tasks are usually carried out during unrelated everyday activities (ongoing tasks), this kind of ‘memory skill’ is very demanding on our mental resources. For example, successful time-based prospective memory depends on self-monitoring the time while also remembering what needs to be done and when to do it. Research has found that giving people an idea of the context in which a future task will occur, can improve prospective memory accuracy in the general population. Although there is very little research on this topic in autism research, the findings tend to suggest that autistic people commonly experience general difficulties with prospective memory, and particularly have difficulties carrying out plans for future time-based prospective memory activities. 

 Aims:

The research looked at how context cues might support autistic people to carry out every day time-based prospective memory tasks. The researchers predicted that context cues would improve time-based prospective memory accuracy to a greater extent for autistic people, compared to receiving no context information or receiving incorrect information.  

 Method:

The study included 62 participants, who were 38 autistic adults and 24 non-autistic adults. Participants were matched on age, gender and general intellectual ability (IQ). All participants first completed a No Context task and then completed a second task with different context information. The ongoing task was to sort words and pictures as either ‘foods’ or ‘non-foods’. Participants also had to keep track of time during the task, by checking an on-screen timer. For the time-based prospective memory task, participants had to remember to press a button when the clock showed 3-minutes. In the Correct Context and False Context conditions, participants were given information on when the target time would happen. The Correct Context cue should help participants to make more accurate prospective memory responses, but the False Context cue would likely show less accurate responses. 

Results: 

The researchers are still completing their analysis of the data. Their provisional findings suggest that targeted contextual information could help to reduce time-based prospective memory difficulties for autistic adults. They also observed that autistic adults were more vigilant in time monitoring – they checked the clock more often than non-autistic participants. Further analysis is being done to understand if autistic people use time monitoring combined with contextual information as strategies to support prospective memory. These early insights could offer new ways to potentially improving prospective memory and, in this way, support autistic people to live more autonomously in everyday life. 

Check out the poster here: