Abstract
BackgroundThe objective of this study was to examine differences in episodic memory retrieval between individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing (TD) individuals. Previous studies have shown that personality similarities between readers and characters facilitated reading comprehension. Highly extraverted participants read stories featuring extraverted protagonists more easily and judged the outcomes of such stories more rapidly than did less extraverted participants. Similarly, highly neurotic participants judged the outcomes of stories with neurotic protagonists more rapidly than did participants with low levels of neuroticism. However, the impact of the similarity effect on memory retrieval remains unclear. This study tested our ‘similarity hypothesis’, namely that memory retrieval is enhanced when readers with ASD and TD readers read stories featuring protagonists with ASD and with characteristics associated with TD individuals, respectively.MethodsEighteen Japanese individuals (one female) with high-functioning ASD (aged 17 to 40 years) and 17 age- and intelligence quotient (IQ)-matched Japanese (one female) TD participants (aged 22 to 40 years) read 24 stories; 12 stories featured protagonists with ASD characteristics, and the other 12 featured TD protagonists. Participants read a single sentence at a time and pressed a spacebar to advance to the next sentence. After reading all 24 stories, they were asked to complete a recognition task about the target sentence in each story.ResultsTo investigate episodic memory in ASD, we analyzed encoding based on the reading times for and readability of the stories and retrieval processes based on the accuracy of and response times for sentence recognition. Although the results showed no differences between ASD and TD groups in encoding processes, they did reveal inter-group differences in memory retrieval. Although individuals with ASD demonstrated the same level of accuracy as did TD individuals, their patterns of memory retrieval differed with respect to response times.ConclusionsIndividuals with ASD more effectively retrieved ASD-congruent than ASD-incongruent sentences, and TD individuals retrieved stories with TD more effectively than stories with ASD protagonists. Thus, similarity between reader and story character had different effects on memory retrieval in the ASD and TD groups.
Highlights
The objective of this study was to examine differences in episodic memory retrieval between individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing (TD) individuals
Reading times that were more than 2.5 SDs above the mean for each participant were eliminated because it has been recommended that SD cutoffs be used to analyze response-time data as they reflect the variability of subject means [40]
We conducted a three-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) on reading time with group as a between-participant factor (ASD versus TD) and congruence and episode (ASD versus TD) as within-participant factorsb
Summary
The objective of this study was to examine differences in episodic memory retrieval between individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing (TD) individuals. This study tested our ‘similarity hypothesis’, namely that memory retrieval is enhanced when readers with ASD and TD readers read stories featuring protagonists with ASD and with characteristics associated with TD individuals, respectively. Deep-level (semantic or episodic) processing of verbal materials enhances long-term memory better than does surface-level (phonological or perceptual) processing, a phenomenon known as the ‘levels-of-processing effect’ This assumes that retrieval is a function of trace elaboration at the time of encoding; that is, the deeper or more elaborate the encoding process is, the more likely it becomes that the information will be retrieved later [11]. Given that the self-related levels-ofprocessing effect was not found in individuals with ASD [12], it is likely that individuals with ASD use atypical retrieval systems
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