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Evaluating correlations between lab-based and an informant-report, ‘real-life’ measure of working memory in adolescents with ASD.

Social communication deficits are characteristic of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and severely affect their ability to understand, build, and maintain relationships. Previous research has suggested a link between social communication and executive functions such as working memory (WM), which is required to attend to, think about, and act upon new information for the purpose of understanding rules and/or carrying out goal directed behaviour. However, there are inconsistent results when evaluating WM in autistic individuals, and this inconsistency is potentially due to the different tasks and assessments that are used to evaluate it. The overall objective of the current project is to evaluate relationships between lab-based and a ‘real-life’ WM measure in adolescents with ASD. This will be carried out by (1) obtaining lab-based and real-life WM scores from 30 adolescents with ASD for correlational analysis; and (2) Having half of the participants complete an intensive, computerized WM training to determine whether lab-based or real-life measures better captured any associated changes.