I think it is interesting how high functioning Autistic people are more likely to have minds like tape recorders, and low functioning autistic people are more likely to have minds like cameras. I also have exceptional verbal memory although poor visual memory. It is a bit of a risk though, it is very easy to completely memorize a complex paper but actually understanding it is more of a challenge. It seems that the more Autistic a person is the more the trade off between memorizing and understanding increases (in favor of memorizing). Thankfully I am able to understand complex things, but I can almost always verbally memorize them first. I have read about some Autistic people who are so good at one type of memory that they can mask deficiencies in other types of memory. For example, someone with very poor long term visual memory, but genius level long term verbal memory, could encode a picture with words. So if they are presented with a picture, they could remember it with words, and then if they are asked questions about the picture half an hour later they could describe it without actually remembering it visually. This could be perceived as them having adequate long term visual memory, when in reality they just have exceptional long term verbal memory. Most people would visually recall the image in their minds and answer the questions about it using their mental image as a reference, but someone who can remember words verbatim but who struggles to recall images, could encode the entire picture to words and then answer questions about it based off of their stored verbal information. There are of course more specialized tests that can get around this though. There are actually a lot of examples of people with high functioning Autism using what would normally be horribly inefficient methodologies to successfully complete tests with average+ scores. This is due to them having extremely well developed abilities in areas that do not normally map directly to the test they are presented with, and poorly developed abilities in areas that normally map directly to the test (ie: using exceptional long term verbal memory to appear to have average long term visual memory).