Comparing Explicit and Implicit Learning of Emotional and Non-Emotional Words in Autistic Children

Background: Explicit and implicit memories have different cerebral origins and learning approaches. Defective emotional words processing in children with autism may affect the memory allocated to such words. The aim of this study was comparing two types of (explicit and implicit) memories during processing the two types of (emotional and non-emotional) words in autistic children and their healthy counterparts. Materials and Methods: The present cross sectional study was conducted on 14 autistic children, who had referred to Autism Medical Treatment Center on Tehran, and 14 healthy children in kindergartens and schools across Tehran. For the explicit memory, a list of words was presented to the subjects of our study and they were asked to repeat the words they heard one time immediately and one time with delay. For implicit memory, the subjects were asked to identify the heard words among the presented words. Statistical analysis was performed using two-way analysis of variance. Results: The results showed that the normal children have higher efficiency in explicit and implicit memory than the children with autism (p < 0.01). The two-way analysis of memory type and word type showed that the former affects memory significantly (p < 0.05) while word type had no significant effect. Conclusion: Autistic children suffer from impaired memory. This defect is higher in implicit memory than in the explicit memory. It is recommended to apply rehabilitation, training, learning approaches and also explicit memory for interventions of autistic children.