Abstract
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) usually manifest heterogeneous impairments in their higher cognitive functions, including their implicit memory (IM) and explicit memory (EM). However, the findings on IM and EM in youths with ASD remain debated. The aim of this study was to clarify such conflicting results by examining IM and EM using two comparable versions of the Serial Reaction Time Task (SRTT) in the same group of children and adolescents with ASD. Twenty-five youths with high-functioning ASD and 29 age-matched and IQ-matched typically developing youths undertook both tasks. The ability to implicitly learn the temporal sequence of events across the blocks in the SRTT was intact in the youths with ASD. When they were tested for EM, the participants with ASD did not experience a significant reduction in their reaction times during the blocks with the previously learned sequence, suggesting an impairment in EM. Moreover, the participants with ASD were less accurate and made more omissions than the controls in the EM task. The implications of these findings for the establishment of tailored educational programs for children with high-functioning ASD are discussed.
Highlights
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) presented with deficits on the explicit, but not implicit, version of the Serial Reaction Time Task (SRTT) compared with the typically developing participants (TD) group
Our results are consistent with meta-analyses that have reported the relative preservation of implicit memory (IM) processes in individuals with ASD [46,48,49], based on the SRTT and other tasks, such as the alternating SRTT, Contextual Cueing [71], the Pursuit Rotor task [72,73,74], the Artificial Grammar Learning task [75,76], the Speech Stream task [77], the Observational
Our results suggest that teaching techniques that are based primarily on explicit cognitive strategies are less affordable for children and adolescents with ASD
Summary
ASD has heterogeneous manifestations because the features and severity of its symptoms can vary significantly between patients, and because its core symptoms are frequently associated with co-occurring neurological or psychiatric conditions, such as epilepsy, intellectual disability, anxiety disorders, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and depression [4,5]
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