ORIGINAL PAPER
Pre-Conceptual Aspects of Self-Awareness in Autism Spectrum
Disorder: The Case of Action-Monitoring
David Williams Æ Francesca Happe
´
Published online: 22 July 2008
Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008
Abstract Two experiments were conducted to explore
the extent to which individuals with autism experience
difficulties in monitoring their own actions, both online and
in memory. Participants with autism performed similarly in
terms of levels and, importantly, patterns of performance
to IQ-matched comparison participants. Each group found
it easier to monitor their own actions/agency than to
monitor the agency of the experimenter in a computerized
task requiring individuals to distinguish person-caused
from computer-caused changes in phenomenology. Both
groups also showed a typical ‘self-reference effect’,
recalling their own actions better than those of the exper-
imenter. Both tasks appear to be reliable markers of
underlying action monitoring ability, performance on the
‘Self’ conditions of each task being significantly associ-
ated, independent of verbal ability.
Keywords Autism Á Self-awareness Á Action monitoring Á
Agency Á Source memory
According to some theorists (e.g., Pacherie 1997; Russell
1996), Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) involves a deficit
in a basic form of non-reflexive, ‘ecological’ self-aware-
ness—the ability to monitor one’s own basic actions.
Russell and Hill (2001, p. 317) define action monitoring as,
‘‘the mechanisms that ensure that agents know, without
self-observation, (a) for which changes in perceptual input
they are responsible and (b) what they are currently
engaged in doing’’. Effective action monitoring therefore
allows an individual to distinguish between ‘self-caused’
and ‘world-caused’ changes in experience and hence, in
Russell’s theory, gives rise to an experience of agency.
According to the monitoring deficit view, individuals with
ASD have a diminished feeling of responsibility for, or
ownership of, their own actions ‘from the inside’, so-to-
speak. This position is similar to that which Searle (1983)
suggested an individual experiences when their ‘intentions-
in-action’ fail to become conscious (for instance, when
automatically changing the gears of a car). Pacherie (1997)
extended Searle’s analysis to suggest that children with
ASD are unable to generate ‘motor images’, a form of
conscious motor representation deriving from motor
intentions for action (Jeannerod 1994). It is these motor
images which Pacherie (p. 234) suggests provide ‘‘the
organism with an awareness of what is intended and with a
grasp of his body as a generator of active forces’’.
According to Pacherie’s theory, therefore, difficulties in
generating motor images results in action monitoring
impairments in ASD.
Impairments in action monitoring in ASD have been
inferred from findings of a reduced ability to discriminate
between the actions of self and other in tests of source
memory. Hala et al. (2005), for example, found children
with ASD less able than typically developing (TD) com-
parison participants, matched for verbal mental age (VMA),
to recall whether a series of words had been spoken by
themselves or by an experimenter. More strikingly, studies
by Russell and Jarrold (1999) and Millward et al. (2000)
found an unusual pattern of memory performance in partic-
ipants with ASD. In each of these studies, participants with
D. Williams Á F. Happe
´
Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, De Crespigny
Park, London SE 5 8AF, UK
D. Williams (&)
Institute of Child Health, University College London,
30 Guilford Street, London WC1N 1EH, UK
e-mail: d.williams@ich.ucl.ac.uk
123
J Autism Dev Disord (2009) 39:251–259
DOI 10.1007/s10803-008-0619-x