Horus wrote:
daydreamer84~
I probably should mention the fact that i've never received an official ASD diagnosis. I have taken six neuropsychological evaluation in my life and marginally speaking, I failed to meet the AS/ASD criteria on any of them according (I disagree with their assessment...but that's another story) the psychologists who administered them. I have been told (on almost all these evaluations) I exhibit the general characteristics associated with NVLD/NLD however. Since NLD is not formal mental disorder, I usually have received the LD-NOS or Mathematics Disorder Dx on Axis-I of these tests.
As you probably know....there is alot of debate as to whether AS and NLD/NVLD are really one and the same disorder or not. I personally believe they have a common etiology and the all the supposed distinctions between the two disorders comes down to little more than diagnostic hair-splitting. Anyway....I just thought i'd let you know as this would likely be relevant to any decisions you may make regarding my participation in your study.
Hi Horus,
I should have read this post before responding to your pm. Okay....well....I am speaking to my supervisor on Tues. about funding your expenses....since you're coming in from out-of-town. Since you have no official AS/ASD diagnosis you cannot be an ASD participant....but maybe you can participate as a normal control. I will ask my supervisor about this...however he may be more reluctant to pay your expenses...because "normal controls” are easier to come by than AS participants. I agree that NVLD is VERY similar to AS, but, as you said, it isn't in the DSM (as an ASD or otherwise), so to s ay the participants in our experimental group have ASD’s, the participants must have exact diagnosis that fits that category. n Also the experimental group participants do need official diagnoses. It just has to be all very official and by the book.... Psychology likes to pretend to be an exact science. =) However if you are accepted as a control, then , it should be just as useful to you in terms of finding out about your memory.
About the guitar playing.......I'm sorry, I did not read your original post very carefully (I skimmed most of it) I didn't sleep last night....I have to get my rationale done to submit to the ethics comitee by Wed....am very nervous about it......you probably DID make it clear that you have trouble playing on your own......I guess I just think of performance anxiety as anxiety about performing in front of some sort of audience....but of course you could feel anxious about performing a task/ skill properly....on your own. Anyways, it still holds that procedural memory can be impeded by this kind of anxiety.
In terms of compensatory mechanism....... I can't really give you advice on HOW to use declarative memory to your advantage, as compensation for faulty procedural memory. more knowledge about how this compensatory mechanism works may one day lead to a management strategy for poor procedural memory. It is just the case that people with impaired procedural memory have been shown to use declarative memory to learn motor skills and habits (things that in most people are mediated by the procedural system). So...one of your memory systems doesn't work... so you use the other...automatically. In the first article link I sent you children with autism and controls are taught a motor skill, they become more skilful at it each time they perform it, then a competing motor stimulus is introduced at one point in the experiment, which causes the controls to show a sharp decline in performance. A competing motor stimulus interferes with procedural memory, but not declarative. The children with autism show much less of a decline in performance of the motor skill when the competing stimulus is introduced. This suggests that they may be relying more on declarative memory than controls. There was another study like this with people who have impaired procedural memory. When they preformed a motor skill (in an FMRI study) the brain regions associated with procedural memory were more active and those associated with procedural memory less active than the controls. There is not a lot of research on this topic yet...
04 Sep 2010, 11:45 pm
