Linda Pring

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at Goldsmiths University of London

Background Autobiographical memory plays a key role in self-understanding and psychological health. While deficits in autobiographical memory are well-established in autism, few studies have focused on adolescence; a critical period for the developing self and self-esteem. Method 16 adolescents with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 16 typical...

Studies in infants and young children with congenital visual impairment (VI) have indicated early developmental vulnerabilities, conversely research with older children and adults have highlighted areas of cognitive strength. A minimal amount is known, however, about the possible combination of strengths and weaknesses in adolescence, and this pres...

Since Köhler’s experiments in the 1920s, researchers have demonstrated a correspondence between words and shapes. Dubbed the “Bouba–Kiki” effect, these auditory–visual associations extend across cultures and are thought to be universal. More recently the effect has been shown in other modalities including taste, suggesting the effect is independent...

Introduction: Previous research has suggested that visual images are more easily generated, more vivid and more memorable than other sensory modalities. This research examined whether or not imagery is experienced in similar ways by people with and without sight. Specifically, the imageability of visual, auditory and tactile cue words was compared....

According to the Royal National Institute for the Blind (1991) there are about 20 000 children and about 1 million adults who are blind or partially sighted in the UK. Rahi et al. (2003) reported on the incidence and causes of severe visual impairment and blindness in children in the UK suggesting that 4 of every 10 000 children born in the UK will...

Lack of sight compromises insight into other people's mental states. Little is known about the role of maternal language in assisting the development of mental state language in children with visual impairment (VI). To investigate mental state language strategies of mothers of school-aged children with VI and to compare these with mothers of compar...

For wayfinding at museums, galleries, and heritage sites, the majority of people who are blind or partially sighted favour verbal directions over tactile maps. Those who provide such directions are usually fully sighted. Can we assume that details considered important by those with vision are equally helpful to those without? This article presents...

Presence describes immersion in a mediated environment such that it seems unmediated. For people with visual impairment, audio description replaces missing visual information with a verbal commentary, transforming an audiovisual medium into audio. Media forms are more or less immersive, with audio-only at the bottom of the scale. Anecdotally, howev...

A high incidence of absolute pitch has been reported among individuals with visual impairment (VI), while recent behavioral and imaging evidence has indicated that enhanced abilities in the auditory domain result from the cross-modal takeover of the visually deafferented occipital areas. In this study, we tested the identification of musical pitch...

We aimed to explore the organization of the calendar knowledge base underlying date calculation by assessing the ability of savant calendar calculators to free recall a series of date lists. Four experiments are reported that assessed recall of structural and non-structural features of the calendar in eight savant calendar calculators (seven males;...

Two studies are presented that explored the effects of experimental manipulations on the quality and accessibility of autobiographical memories in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), relative to a typical comparison group matched for age, gender and IQ. Both studies found that the adults with ASD generated fewer specific memories than the c...

Autobiographical memory difficulties have been widely reported in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The aim of the current study was to explore the potential correlates of autobiographical memory performance (including depressed mood, rumination, working memory and theory of mind) in adults with ASD, relative to a group of typical adults...

Self-report measures have suggested that individuals experience vivid images in all sensory modalities, including flavour (e.g., Betts, 1909; Johnson, 1980). The validity of subjective reports are supported indirectly by neuroscientific evidence suggesting a role for perception in visual imagery experiences (e.g., Kikuchi, Kubota, Nisijima, Washiya...

The study investigated the extent to which two groups of blind children were able to use tactual picture information to improve memory performance for auditorily presented texts. Adventitiously blind children demonstrated significant increases in amount recalled with illustrated presentation, showing improved recall of information represented in bo...

Two experiments were carried out to investigate the role of auditory and visual imagery in word recognition processes of blind and sighted children. In Expt 1 children made lexical decisions to high auditory imagery and low auditory imagery words matched for concreteness. In contrast to results found by Paivio & Okovita (1971) in paired-associate l...

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often display impairments in creativity, yet savant artists with ASD are reported to produce highly novel and original artistic outputs. To explore this paradox, we assessed nine savant artists with ASD, nine talented art students, nine non-artistically talented individuals with ASD, and nine individu...

This study assessed theory of mind understanding in children with congenital profound visual impairment (CPVI): children who have had no access to visual information throughout development. Participants were 18 children with CPVI and no other impairments, aged between 5 and 11 years, and 18 children with normal vision, matched individually on chron...

Background: Development of children with congenital visual impairment (VI) has been associated with vulnerable socio-communicative outcomes often bearing striking similarities to those of sighted children with autism. 1 To date, very little is known about language and social communication in children with VI of normal intelligence. Methods: We exam...

This book provides a detailed account of intellectual, other neuropsychological and behavioral manifestations of general pediatric diseases. The conditions discussed include the whole range of pediatric diseases - genetic syndromes, other congenital conditions, metabolic, endocrine, gastrointestinal, infectious, immunologic, toxic, trauma, and neop...

Although executive functions have been widely studied in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), there have been no direct empirical studies of executive abilities in savants with ASD. This study assessed three facets of executive ability (fluency, perseveration and monitoring) in savant artists with ASD, compared to non-talented adults w...

We explored the hypothesis that an enhanced local processing style is characteristic of both art and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by examining local and global processing in savant artists with ASD. Specifically, savant artists were compared against non-talented individuals with ASD or mild/moderate learning difficulties (MLD), as well as artisti...

Development of children with congenital visual impairment (VI) has been associated with vulnerable socio-communicative outcomes often bearing striking similarities to those of sighted children with autism.(1) To date, very little is known about language and social communication in children with VI of normal intelligence. We examined the presentatio...

Autobiographical memory impairments in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been attributed to a failure in using the self as an effective memory organisational system. To explore this hypothesis, we compared self-defining and everyday memories in adults with and without ASD. Results demonstrated that both groups were able to distinguish between se...

Autobiographical knowledge is stored hierarchically, at both specific and general levels of representation. It has also been proposed that the self is the structure around which autobiographical memories are organised. The current series of studies assessed whether the autobiographical memory difficulties observed in adults with autism spectrum dis...

Unusual sensory processing has been widely reported in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs); however, the majority of research in this area has focused on children. The present study assessed sensory processing in adults with ASD using the Adult/Adolescent Sensory Profile (AASP), a 60-item self-report questionnaire assessing levels of sensory processin...

The study investigated attentional processes of 32 preschool children with congenital visual impairment (VI). Children with profound visual impairment (PVI) and severe visual impairment (SVI) were compared to a group of typically developing sighted children in their ability to respond to adult directed attention in terms of establishing, maintainin...

Background: In typical adults, self-referential information receives privileged encoding, which facilitates subsequent memory retrieval. This is especially true of information relating to personal goals (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). However, several studies have shown that the ‘self-reference effect' in memory is either attenuated (Lombardo, Ba...

Background: ABM is stored hierarchically, at both general and specific levels of representation. Furthermore, it has been proposed that the self is the structure around which ABMs are organised (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). Deficits in ABM retrieval have been consistently reported in ASD (Crane & Goddard, in press). Considering that ASD is asso...

Background: Previous research has shown that the pattern of socio-communicative and socio-cognitive development in children born with severely impaired vision often bears a striking resemblance to that of sighted children with autism. Objectives: It is now critical to provide a more detailed picture of such development and in particular to focus on...

The performance of children (and sometimes adults) with visual impairments (VI) on a range of tasks that reflect learning, memory and mental imagery is considered in this article. Sometimes the evidence suggests that there are impairments in performance in comparison with typically developing children with vision and sometimes some advantages emerg...

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We examined absolute-pitch (AP) and short-term musical memory abilities of five musical savants with congenital blindness, seven musicians, and seven non-musicians with good vision and normal intelligence in two experiments. In the first, short-term memory for musical phrases was tested and the savants and musicians performed statistically indistin...

In this chapter it is argued that memory performance provides a coherent picture of savant abilities, even though the talents displayed make different demands on memory and learning. The chapter opens with an introduction to savant talent, to issues in relation to domain-specificity and modularity, as well as the role of practice and implicit memor...

It has been argued that individuals born without sight are impaired on all “active” spatial imagery tasks (e.g., Vecchi, 1998). If this were the case, people without sight would be limited in their capacity to manipulate, amalgamate, or reorganise information within imagery. A consequence of this would be a difficulty in creating novel forms using...

Images can be generated in all sensory modalities. Nevertheless, research on the everyday use of mental imagery, for example in autobiographical memory tasks, has suggested that it is only visual images that facilitate memory retrieval (e.g., Williams, Healy, & Ellis, 199944. Williams , J. M. G. , Healy , H. G. and Ellis , N. C. 1999. The effect...

1. Focus on Music: Summary and recommendations 1.1 This study investigates the musical abilities and interests of children and young people with septo-optic dysplasia, drawing on the experiences and views of parents and carers that were elicited via a questionnaire, and through direct observation by members of the research team. 1.2 Septo-optic d...

The two experiments reported here investigated the ability of sighted children and children with visual impairment to comprehend text and, in particular, to draw inferences both while reading and while listening. Children were assigned into `comprehension skill' groups, depending on the degree to which their reading comprehension skill was in line...

Preliminary findings are presented of work undertaken with a prodigious ‘savant’ pianist–Derek Paravicini–in which he learnt a specially-composed piece (The Chromatic Blues) over a number of hearings. All Derek's efforts were recorded digitally, which enabled precise transcriptions to be made. These were analysed in the context of a newly-developed...

Recent anecdotal evidence and appearances in the US media have indicated that children with septo-optic dysplasia (s.o.d.) may have a tendency to precocious musical development, in some cases leading to ‘savant syndrome’. Here, initial evidence based on a questionnaire survey of parents suggests that a significant proportion of this group do appear...

The notion of talent is an elusive concept but there appears to be sound evidence that both savants and experts share important qualities. Brief descriptive accounts of the talents displayed by savants are presented, along with a discussion of intelligence, implicit learning, and the organization of knowledge. Cognitive theories helpful in understa...

The notion of talent is an elusive concept but there appears to be sound evidence that both savants and experts share important qualities. Brief descriptive accounts of the talents displayed by savants are presented, along with a discussion of intelligence, implicit learning, and the organization of knowledge. Cognitive theories helpful in understa...

This article reports the results of an exploratory survey of 32 families of children with septo-optic dysplasia and 32 families of children without visual impairment or any specific health problems (who served as a comparison group). The focus of the research was to explore the children’s musical interests and abilities, the musical provision that...

We investigated the effect of cue modality on the specificity, speed, vividness, and age of autobiographical memory retrieval. Cues were presented as either an odour, a visual image, or a word label. Odour-cued memories were older, more likely to be categoric, and were slower to be retrieved. Few gender differences were found although females repor...

Children aged 11–12 years with a diagnosis of dyslexia (DR) were compared to chronological and reading-age matched poor readers (PR), and two normal reader groups, age-matched (CA) and spelling and reading-age matched (SA–RA), on their processing of inflectional morphology. In comparison to SA–RAs and PRs, the DRs made more spelling errors on regul...

The present study was designed to evaluate the extent to which free recall performance is influenced by competing demands on physiological resources dependent on blood-oxygen levels. Fifty-six healthy young adults (mean age=20 years) were allocated to groups (n1–4=14) according to their level of exercise (more than 6 h aerobic exercise per wk, or s...

This paper describes an individual with autism and high-level calendar calculation ability who could perform a set of unpractised letter/number association tasks. The savant's performance was compared with that of two control participants, one a departmental secretary and the other a professor of mathematics. The facility with which the savant coul...

The aim of this study was to identify some of the underlying cognitive components of artistic talent. The participants in this study were an artistically gifted group of young adults, and a group of controls with no such talent but matched on intelligence. Two components were investigated, one was a preference for local over global processing and o...

This paper describes an individual with autism and high-level calendar calculation ability who could perform a set of unpracticed letter/number association tasks. The savant's performance was compared with that of two control participants, one a departmental secretary and the other a professor of mathematics. The facility with which the savant coul...

A series of studies was carried out designed to investigate the proposal that visually impaired people tend to encode auditory input primarily in terms of sensory features at the expense of non-sensory semantic features. The first two studies investigated recollective experience in blind adolescents of words that differed in terms of imageability....

We examine memory for personal events in a group of visually impaired children/young adults using a semi-structured interview technique and a word cueing task. Memories were assessed for specificity, detail, and emotional and sensory content. We also investigated the age of earliest autobiographical memory. The data suggests that visual impairment...

Two studies designed to investigate the ability of blind subjects to interpret tangible graphic displays of data at varying degrees of orientation are reported. In the first experiment visually handicapped children were required to interpret histograms and pie charts presented at two different orientations. Horizontally oriented histograms were fou...

Two experiments investigated whether, in light of the commonly reported phenomenon of subjective time acceleration with age, there would be an effect of age on the dating of public events. In the first experiment covering the past seven years there was the suggestion of a decrease in forward telescoping with age, and in the second covering the peri...

In this single case study, paintings by a visually impaired and cognitively handicapped savant artist are evaluated. He paints his pictures exclusively from memory, either after having looked at a natural scene through binoculars, or after studying landscape photographs in brochures, catalogues, and books. The paintings are compared with the models...

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the cont...

Children with autistic spectrum disorders typically show impairments in processing affective information within social and interpersonal domains. It has yet to be established whether such difficulties persist in the area of music; a domain which is characteristically rich in emotional content. Fourteen children with autism and Asperger syndrome and...

In this single case study, paintings by a visually impaired and cognitively handicapped savant artist are evaluated. He paints his pictures exclusively from memory, either after having looked at a natural scene through binoculars, or after studying landscape photographs in brochures, catalogues, and books. The paintings are compared with the models...

Savant calendar calculators can supply with speed the day of the week of a given date. Although memory is suggested to be an important component of this unusual ability, memory function has never been systematically investigated in these skilled yet learning impaired individuals. Eight savant calendrical calculators, most of whom had autism, were c...

The relative immunity of the concept of size constancy in the face of changes to the retinal image as well as the pictorial device of linear perspective were investigated with 9 savant artists and 9 controls. For drawing use of pictorial rules seemed independent of levels of intelligence; however, when a construction instead of a drawing task had t...

This article reports on a study of children's understanding of the intentions of characters in a series of stories, found in previous research to be impaired in children with autism but here investigated in 16 children with visual impairment and 16 sighted children. The children with visual impairment gave fewer correct justifications based on ment...

Musically naive autistic children were compared with musically naive mental age-matched control subjects for their ability to identify and remember single-note frequencies or speech sounds. As an analogy to testing for absolute pitch, subjects were asked after two different time intervals to point out animal pictures previously paired with these st...

Dr Neil O'Connor, was a distinguished scientist and former Director of the Medical Research Council's Developmental Psychology Unit. He died after being knocked down by a bicycle on 1st October 1997. He was 80 years old and I had known him for 18 of them, and this brief article is just to remind us of the unique contribution that he made to our und...

The paper represents an attempt to evaluate the effect of professional art training on savant artistic ability, and focuses on the work of the artist Stephen Wiltshire. It was undertaken jointly by two of Stephen's own tutors at art school and the two principal authors. The context of the research was, by its nature, not experimental but attempted...

Synopsis Poems by an individual with a diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome were analysed and compared with those of a comparison poet. Though the savant poet performed less efficiently on formal language tests supposed to tap creativity, there were few differences between the two poets in regard to the poems' content and the use of various structural...

This article reports three experiments that tested the ability of 11 6–10-year-old children with low vision to recall black-and-white line drawings. Unlike the 22 fully sighted children who were also tested, the children with low vision recalled best when they were left to study the pictures without verbal intervention. Compared with the fully sigh...

This study describes two experiments which investigate pattern construction by graphically gifted, autistic savants. We explore whether the notion of weak central coherence in autism might be extended to account for the relatively high frequency of savants among the autistic population. We also suggest that an awareness of constituent segments in w...

Two experiments are reported which investigated the effects of data-driven generation of study items on direct and indirect measures of memory. Previous research in the field of implicit memory has traditionally employed generation procedures at encoding which focused on conceptually driven processing. The present study undertook to devise data-dri...

Synopsis Savant artists represent a conundrum to our understanding of the nature of high level specific talents as well as to the concept of general intellectual impairment. In the present paper, we are particularly concerned with the relationship between general perceptual-motor functions in relation to drawing aptitude. Drawing is by definition a...

The studies reported here investigated the role of background music in verbal processing. The experiment was a partial replication of Salame and Baddeley (1989), where the effect of music on the recall of digits, was examined, but included an additional key condition where participants heard instrumental music without the words usually associated w...

Two studies are reported in which comprehension and interpretation of raised-line images and graphs by touch were investigated. Experiment 1 required blind-folded sighted subjects and blind subjects to rate the veracity of raised-line drawings in conveying the nature of an image when the complexity of the depicted object was manipulated (from simpl...

Semantic and structural aspects of picture processing were investigated with graphically gifted mentally handicapped subjects and intellectually normal children. The results suggest that savants as well as controls rely primarily on semantically organised memory schemata when reproducing pictures. A semantically determined strategy also determines...

The spelling of a group of 11 partially sighted children, aged 6-10 years, was compared with that of a matched group of 22 fully sighted children, all tested during 1986-7. There was evidence that young partially sighted children were slower to make a start with spelling. No differences were found between the two groups in terms of the reproduction...

We know very little about the reading strategies adopted by children with poor vision. Here a group of children with a range of visuo-perceptual problems including defective foveal vision and impaired eye-movements are compared to a group of fully sighted children (matched on age and verbal ability). Three studies using lexical decision tasks with...

The oral reading errors made by nine partially sighted children, aged five years eight months to eight years seven months, over a seven-month period during 1986 were analysed and found to resemble those of younger fully sighted children. The relevance of this study for teachers of partially sighted children in mainstream schools is suggested.

The word and picture processing abilities of 11 children (ages 6-10) with partial vision were studied in a variety of ways over a period of 14 months. The studies found that in processing words partially sighted children, like fully sighted children, used both lexical and nonlexical processing, though perhaps in difference balance. Recognition and...

Examined whether 8 congenitally blind children (aged 6–12 yrs) were more impaired in recognizing vocal expressions of emotion than they were in recognizing the sounds of nonemotional objects as compared with 8 matched, sighted controls. Ss listened to audiotapes containing verbal and nonverbal emotional sounds and various nonemotional sound effects...

Three experiments are reported which investigate the effects of study/test compatibility on implicit and explicit memory performance. In the first experiment subjects either named each visually presented target item, or generated each item from a close semantic associate. They were then given either a free recall test or a visual word-stem completi...

Blind and sighted children’s memory for words and raised shape pictures was tested. The investigation compared performance with items when they were studied under neutral conditions (naming words and pictures) and when they were self-generated in response to cues (cue: hot ?: response: cold). The blind children could identify and name the raised sh...

Three experiments were carried out to investigate tactual processing of two-dimensional raised line drawings by blind and blindfolded sighted children. The results showed an unexpected but consistent pattern indicating that the introduction of ‘meaning’ facilitated the performance of the blindfolded sighted children but caused a relative decline in...

The present investigation examined developmental changes in the “automatic” use of context in single word recognition. A modified Stroop procedure was used in which children were asked to name the color of the ink of target words. The target was preceded either by a semantically related or by an unrelated word. Results suggested that, in contrast t...

Tactual processing of information is of much more significance for blind than sighted persons, for whom it is a less dominant channel of communication. However, it has received much less attention than verbal or visual processing of information. In this article, the main outcomes of a series of experiments with congenitally blind children are descr...

Three studies are reported which investigate word priming and memory in congenitally blind and sighted children. Two conditions were of particular interest, a neutral condition, where children read aloud or repeated a word, and a generate condition, where children supplied a target word to a close semantic associate given as a cue. Later, memory fo...

. It was first established that congenitally blind children could match raised-outline pictures and their corresponding verbal labels in Braille. A subsequent recognition task showed that previously presented pictures from the matching task could be reasonably well recognised, although having been paired with the corresponding word improved perform...

Two experiments examining developmental changes in the use of context in single word reading are reported. The first experiment investigated how effectively children can access conceptual knowledge and use this to help their word recognition. The results indicated that young readers can on demand direct their attention to semantic information, and...

A semantic categorization task was carried out on single words in order to determine under what circumstances a phonological code might be implicated in the process of getting from print to meaning. The subjects were asked whether or not a target word presented visually was a member of a superordinate category or “sounded like” a member of a catego...

Determined whether the input modality and orthographic differences in Braille reading produce different word recognition strategies for blind as compared with sighted persons. 10 blind children (mean age 12 yrs 1 mo), 5 congenitally blind adults (aged 22–30 yrs), and 18 sighted children (mean age 10 yrs 6 mo) were compared as to the extent to which...

2 word/nonword decision experiments were carried out to investigate differences in reading that might exist between congenitally blind children reading Braille and sighted children dealing with print. 3 aspects of single-word recognition were studied: semantic processing, word-frequency effects, and phonological recoding. In addition, a comparison...

Two experiments were carried out to investigate phonological and tactual coding in Braille reading by blind children. In the first, the children read aloud two lists of word pairs, one item at a time. The second or ‘target’ word of each pair (e.g. on) was the same in both lists. In one list, the congruent list, the phonology and orthography of the...

The grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence procedure for generating nonlexical phonological codes comprises two stages. The first, a parsing procedure, divides a letter string into functional spelling units (FSUs), each unit corresponding to a single phoneme. The second stage assigns the appropriate phoneme to the spelling units according to predictabl...

The aim of this collection of contributions is to provide new insights into the relationship between autism and blindness--a relationship that is illuminating but certainly complex and from some perspectives debatable. The book offers a set of chapters by leading researchers and clinicians who have characterized significant features associated with...