The ability to navigate new environments has a significant impact on the daily life and independence of people with learning difficulties. The aims of this study were to investigate the development of route learning in Down syndrome (N = 50), Williams syndrome (N = 19), and typically developing children between 5 and 11 years old (N = 108); to…

Few researchers have investigated the factors that influence children's tendency to indicate correctly when they do not know the answer to a question. In this study, 5- to 8-year-olds witnessed a staged event in their classroom and were subsequently interviewed about that event either the following day or after 5 months. Some of the questions were…

The aim of this study was to investigate route-learning ability in 67 children aged 5 to 11 years and to relate route-learning performance to the components of Baddeley's model of working memory. Children carried out tasks that included measures of verbal and visuospatial short-term memory and executive control and also measures of verbal and…

Adults ask children questions in a variety of contexts, for example, in the classroom, in the forensic context, or in experimental research. In such situations children will inevitably be asked some questions to which they do not know the answer, because they do not have the required information ("unanswerable" questions). When asked unanswerable…

We investigated whether children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) have a deficit in recognising familiar faces. Children with ASD were given a forced choice familiar face recognition task with three conditions: full faces, inner face parts and outer face parts. Control groups were children with developmental delay (DD) and typically…

The term "source monitoring" refers to the ability to distinguish the origin of memories. Comparison of source monitoring with 15 autistic, 15 mildly mentally retarded, and 15 non-disabled children found no differences among groups in the ability to identify which words the child had said and which words another person had said. (Author/DB)

This study examined the metacognitive ability (recall readiness) in matched groups of children with autism, children with mental retardation, and normally developing children (all with a mental age of 7). Children with autism and children with mental retardation had impaired recall readiness compared to the normally developing children. (Author/DB)