Question for NTs about how you think

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I just invited a bunch of my NT internet friends to get into it, since there seems to be a paucity of NT responses to a thread aimed at NTs: some may become members, or some may e-mail me their responses to post. They're all intelligent and relatively "sophisticated" in this area people. (A couple of them I'm pretty sure are undiagnosed Aspies, one is the mother of an Autie, but those may not respond at all.) Fair warning: strangers coming in!

Couldn't even take in the instructions of what to do, let alone do it.

i was very pleased when as a child i discovered the actual wooden disk set in school (which coincided with the height of my interest in arbitrary intellectual puzzles--now they just bore me). it didn't take me very long to find the pattern, certainly wordlessly, but the joy i felt was in the perceived implication (i don't know where it came from) that this was the MINIMUM solution.

much later, i read Shelley's "Ode to Intellectual Beauty" & found a name for that feeling.

For me, the hardest part of the puzzle was definitely understanding the instructions. I knew what the Tower of Hanoi task was, but I still read the instructions, and I had to read them several times.

I have been reading a lot of autism studies recently, and I noticed a disturbing trend in the literature, which is that a significant proportion of autistic children or adults don't understand the instructions of the what the tasks in the studies are asking them to do. But the researchers apparently explain the instructions once the same way for everyone, and they don't know who understood and who didn't understand. So after the experiments, they discover that some people didn't understand the instructions and just did random things on the tasks, so they have to exclude those from the results, which reduces their sample size from the already small sample sizes in most of the studies. I don't understand why they don't make sure that everyone understands what they are supposed to be doing instead of waiting for them to fail to do the task, e.g. press button when X happens, then having to eliminate irrelevant data points from the results.

I can hear myself rambling on in my head with music playing in the "background" of my mind. Very, very distracting.

The abstract has appeared on PubMed, but no free article.

Title: Inner speech is used to mediate short-term memory, but not planning, among intellectually high-functioning adults with autism spectrum disorder.

Abstract: Evidence regarding the use of inner speech by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is equivocal. To clarify this issue, the current study employed multiple techniques and tasks used across several previous studies. In Experiment 1, participants with and without ASD showed highly similar patterns and levels of serial recall for visually presented stimuli. Both groups were significantly affected by the phonological similarity of items to be recalled, indicating that visual material was spontaneously recoded into a verbal form. Confirming that short-term memory is typically verbally mediated among the majority of people with ASD, recall performance among both groups declined substantially when inner speech use was prevented by the imposition of articulatory suppression during the presentation of stimuli. In Experiment 2, planning performance on a tower of London task was substantially detrimentally affected by articulatory suppression among comparison participants, but not among participants with ASD. This suggests that planning is not verbally mediated in ASD. It is important that the extent to which articulatory suppression affected planning among participants with ASD was uniquely associated with the degree of their observed and self-reported communication impairments. This confirms a link between interpersonal communication with others and intrapersonal communication with self as a means of higher order problem solving.

Reference: Dev Psychopathol. 2012 Feb;24(1):225-39.

Authors: Williams DM, Bowler DM, Jarrold C. Durham University.

@fraac: Do you know what Experiment 1 was? The short-term memory experiment? It sounds something like recalling pictures of items by recoding pictures into words, "sail" and "couch" vs. "sail" and "snail", with better performance on latter trial due to phonological similarity of words. If so, then that is not a surprising result for HFASD adults. I wonder about children though. There is a difference between using inner speech of single or few words vs. longer grammaticaller phrases and sentences for verbal planning.

New question: When you look at pictures of objects, do you think of the words for the objects right away? I find that I tend to focus on the details in the pictures instead of thinking of the words for the objects. I often forget the words for common objects.

He sent me the paper, I can email it to anyone who wants. PM me your address. Haven't digested it yet.

Ha! I was right! Now where's my prize?

Harharhar, the phonological similarity thing was just the opposite of what I had thought.

It is harder to recall in order a sequence of pictures of things named "cat", "hat", "mat", "bat" (similar) than "cat", "bell", "poop", "lice" (dissimilar).

I have never seen an autism study in which the mean ages of the participants were higher than in this study. (~40) Usually, "HFASD adults" = 20-year-olds.

40% (6 of 15) of participants with ASD presumably used inner speech for the planning task, compared with 88% (14 of 16) of controls.

When people are using inner speech for a task, are they aware that they are using inner speech for the task? Could I be using inner speech without knowing that I am using inner speech?

Possibly...

Sometimes it's going on but I'm not really paying any attention to it. Background noise, if you like, but I suppose it must still serve some purpose unless it is habit.

As an aid for memory I'd say you'd definitely be aware of it. otherwise it would rather defeat the purpose.

I have asked neurotypical people about their "inner voice". It seems like they can address themselves by this inner verbal monolouge, so they are able to "guide" themselves through their day and in extention throughout life with it (up to a certain extend). Also they mentioned "intuition" a lot and choosing emotionally, so the emotions are taken into consideration. They also have a visual way of thinking, but to a much lesser extend, which means, that they don't have to translate the pictures in their heads into language.
I don't know how to address myself in a verbal way - if I try it consciously, I fall into palilalia. But now I have started to draw my tasks like householding and it seems, that I have a better orientation this way than writing things down, but I have been trying it now just lately, so I don't know if it will last.

I had no difficulty completing the Tower of Hanoi puzzle while saying tuesday.

I also attempted the task after translating the moves into words, and vocalising them, 'move disc one to peg three', and so on. Translating the moves into words was slow, but after working out what I needed to say, I could still complete the task while verbalising. It involved more effort and twice I took 50% more time to complete the task. I would prefer to carry out more instances of the test, but I am too tired.