What is RDI?

IF you haven't read part one, click here The main body of research on episodic memory within ASD has been carried out by Lind.   Lind(2010) states that the interpersonal social communication difficulties, experienced by individuals with ASD, inhibits their ability to form episodic memories through parent-child engagements within shared moments, events or episodes.   ·        As individuals with autism have difficulty sensing the emotions that they are experiencing in the moment this will impede any emotional episodic memory encoding and will therefore impact emotion related recall.   o    Research by Lind (2010), cites a case study in which a 21-year-old high functioning individual with autism was able to recall that one of his unique personality traits was that he was friendly.   When asked to recall specific detail on when he was friendly to another, or an event where he showed friendly behaviour, he was unable to d...

Welcome to our series on The power of Episodic Memory in Autism .  The Main text will be Part 1 and Part 2 .  Along with these two foundational blog posts will be posts going into additional detail with examples and applications.  We welcome your questions and comments as you read through and think about your own family,  which will help inspire future blog posts. Thank you to Sharon for starting this series with the backbone centered around episodic memory.  Sharon's contact info can be found at the end of this article.  Our self-identity is formed through personal memories created in specific moments in everyday life that connect emotions, experience and events as lived in episodes, exclusive to us as individuals (Tulving, 2002).  In a nutshell, we could both be in the same place at the same time, we may or may not be there together and yet the emotional experience that we come away with could be very different.  For in...

Relationships teach us about multiple perspectives and provide the experience to show us that there is more than one right way of thinking, feeling, solving a problem and behaving. Through relationship encounters, we see the world through another’s eyes and notice it is not identical to our own. Relationships teach us to think about the world in a relative and not absolute manner. In a relationship our actions cannot be interpreted as right or wrong. Rather, they are meaningful or not depending on how they impact the individuals involved in the relationship. Rather than pushing a button or following a script, relationships require us to constantly evaluate and re-evaluate the state of our connection to one another and make ongoing adjustments. The essential skills of relationship differ from the typical social skills taught in classes or social skills groups. We are accustomed to thinking of social skills as teaching behaviors such as making eye contact, waiting your turn, smiling, ...