Ann E. Lambert

Driving simulator performance in novice drivers with autism spectrum disorder: the role of executive functions and basic motor skills

Previous studies have shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate poorer driving performance than their peers and are less likely to obtain a driver’s license. This study aims to examine the relationship between driving performance and executive functioning for novice drivers, with and without ASD, using a driving simulator. Forty-four males (ages 15–23), 17 with ASD and 27 healthy controls, completed paradigms assessing driving skills and executive functioning. ASD drivers demonstrated poorer driving performance overall and the addition of a working memory task resulted in a significant decrement in their performance relative to control drivers. Results suggest that working memory may be a key mechanism underlying difficulties demonstrated by ASD drivers and provides insight for future intervention programs.

Aging and Repeated Thought Suppression Success

Intrusive thoughts and attempts to suppress them are common, but while suppression may be effective in the short-term, it can increase thought recurrence in the long-term. Because intentional suppression involves controlled processing, and many aspects of controlled processing decline with age, age differences in thought suppression outcomes may emerge, especially over repeated thought suppression attempts as cognitive resources are expended. Using multilevel modeling, we examined age differences in reactions to thought suppression attempts across four thought suppression sequences in 40 older and 42 younger adults. As expected, age differences were more prevalent during suppression than during free monitoring periods, with younger adults indicating longer, more frequent thought recurrences and greater suppression difficulty. Further, younger adults’ thought suppression outcomes changed over time, while trajectories for older adults’ were relatively stable. Results are discussed in terms of older adults’ reduced thought recurrence, which was potentially afforded by age-related changes in reactive control and distractibility.

Remembering or knowing how we felt: Depression and anxiety symptoms predict retrieval processes during emotional self-report.

Researchers and clinicians routinely rely on patients’ retrospective emotional self-reports to guide diagnosis and treatment, despite evidence of impaired autobiographical memory and retrieval of emotional information in depression and anxiety. To clarify the nature and specificity of these impairments, we conducted two large online data collections (Study 1, N = 1,983; Study 2, N = 900) examining whether depression and/or anxiety symptoms would uniquely predict the use of self-reported episodic (i.e., remembering) and/or semantic (i.e., knowing) retrieval when rating one’s positive and negative emotional experiences over different time frames. Participants were randomly assigned to one of six time frames (ranging from at this moment to last few years) and were asked to rate how intensely they felt each of four emotions, anxious, sad, calm, and happy, over that period. Following each rating, they were asked several follow-up prompts assessing their perceived reliance on episodic and/or semantic information to rate how they felt, using procedures adapted from the traditional “remember/know” paradigm (Tulving, 1985). Across both studies, depression and anxiety symptoms each uniquely predicted increased likelihood of remembering across emotion types, and decreased likelihood of knowing how one felt when rating positive emotion types. Implications for the theory and treatment of emotion-related memory disturbances in depression and anxiety, and for dual-process theories of memory retrieval more generally, are discussed.