Abstract
“When I was one and a half years old, I was on a ferry lying on red seats” – while several autobiographical accounts by people with autism reveal vivid memories of early childhood, the vast amount of experimental investigations found deficits in personal autobiographic memory in autism. To assess this contradiction empirically, we implemented an online questionnaire on early childhood events to compare people on the autism spectrum (AS) and non-autistic people with respect to their earliest autobiographical episodic memories and the earliest semantic know event as told by another person. Results indicate that people on the AS do not differ from non-autistic people in the age of their earliest know events but remember events from an earlier age in childhood and with more sensory details, contradicting the assumption of an overall deficit in personal episodic memory in autism. Furthermore, our results emphasize the supporting influence of language for memory formation and give evidence for an important role of sensory features in memories of people on the AS.
Highlights
Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder in which some of the important core processes required for memory formation are impaired
Confidence judgments did not differ between groups for remember events [F(1,165) = 0.14, p = 0.707, f = 0.03] but they did for know events in which the control group (CG) was less certain [F(1,165) = 7.76, p = 0.006, f = 0.26]
Based on the intense world theory [21], in line with the expectation of Lyons and Fitzgerald [13], and autobiographical accounts written by people with autism [e.g., Ref. [11, 12]], we hypothesized that people on the autism spectrum (AS) would have earlier autobiographical memories when not being constrained to a specific predefined category or situation
Summary
Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder in which some of the important core processes required for memory formation are impaired. [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]], which seem to be augmented in males in comparison to females, possibly due to differences in verbal fluency [8] These studies included direct social interaction, referred to predefined events or contexts, or asked for autobiographical memories formed later in life than in early childhood. Studies differentiating between semantic know and episodic remember events have shown that only the episodic but not the semantic autobiographical memory is impaired in autism [4, 9]. Tanweer and colleagues reported that not the entire autobiographical memory is affected in autism (know events are preserved), but only those aspects that can be related to the ability to relive one’s past, known as autonoetic awareness (remember) [9]. Other authors attributed deficits in autobiographical memory in autism to a failure in the development of self-identity [4] or to
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