Abstract
Persons with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) demonstrate good memory for single items but difficulties remembering contextual information related to these items. Recently, we found compromised explicit but intact implicit retrieval of object-location information in ASD (Ring et al. Autism Res 8(5):609–619, 2015). Eye-movement data collected from a sub-sample of the participants are the focus of the current paper. At encoding, trial-by-trial viewing durations predicted subsequent retrieval success only in typically developing (TD) participants. During retrieval, TD compared to ASD participants looked significantly longer at previously studied object-locations compared to alternative locations. These findings extend similar observations recently reported by Cooper et al. (Cognition 159:127–138, 2017a) and demonstrate that eye-movement data can shed important light on the source and nature of relational memory difficulties in ASD.
Highlights
In a study (Ring et al 2015) that required 25 Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and 26 age and ability matched typically developing (TD) adults to remember object-locations in pictures of rooms, we have recently found that ASD adults only experienced difficulties in explicitly remembering object-location relations, whereas their implicit memory for the same material was preserved
The results demonstrated that, ASD and TD participants did not differ overall in how much time they spent looking at the scenes and object locations they were asked to remember
When taking subsequent retrieval success into account, it became apparent that encoding-related viewing times differentiated between subsequently remembered versus forgotten object locations only in the TD but not the ASD group
Summary
Besides the well-known difficulties in the areas of social interaction, communication, and flexibility in behaviour (American Psychiatric Association 2013), individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) show a characteristic cognitive profile with strengths and difficulties in areas, such as Theory of Mind (Baron-Cohen et al 1985; Bowler et al 2005; Frith and Frith 2003), perception (Frith and Happé 1994; Happé 1999; Mottron and Burack 2001; Mottron et al 2006; Plaisted et al 2006, 1998), attention (Allen and Courchesne 2001), executive functions (Hill 2004a, b), and memory (Boucher and Bowler 2008; Boucher et al 2012). A number of factors likely contribute to these discrepancies, including the extent to which tasks rely on executive function-related learning strategies (see Solomon et al 2016), and whether to-be-remembered items are studied in isolation or in the context of other items (e.g., Ring et al 2016). Another factor that may be involved is the extent to which test performance might be supported by implicit as well as explicit memory for the studied material.
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