Abstract
Research on memory in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) finds increased difficulty encoding contextual associations in episodic memory and suggests executive dysfunction (e.g., selective attention, cognitive flexibility) and deficient metacognitive monitoring as potential contributing factors. Findings from our lab suggest that age-related impairments in selective attention contribute to those in context memory accuracy and older adults tended to show dependence in context memory accuracy between relevant and irrelevant context details (i.e., hyper-binding). Using an aging framework, we tested the effects of selective attention on context memory in a sample of 23 adults with ASD and 23 typically developed adults. Participants studied grayscale objects flanked by two types of contexts (color, scene) on opposing sides and were told to attend to only one object-context relationship, ignoring the other context. At test, participants made object and context recognition decisions and judgment of confidence decisions allowing for an evaluation of context memory performance, hyper-binding, and metacognitive performance for context judgments in a single task. Results showed that adults with ASD performed similarly to typically developed adults on all measures. These findings suggest that context memory performance is not always disrupted in adults with ASD, even when demands on selective attention are high. We discuss the need for continued research to evaluate episodic memory in a wider variety of adults with ASD.
Highlights
Free recall[20,21,22], and often intact in tests of cued recall or r ecognition[2,7,23]
Emergent research has suggested that context memory accuracy can be improved in typical aging when orienting instructions or tasks are presented during encoding and direct attention to task-relevant associations [e.g., “Is this color likely for this object?”] compared to when attention is directed to a single item or non-contextual features[30,31,32,33,34,35]
Grainger et al.[53] found less accurate feeling of knowing (FOK) judgments in adults with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) but greater self-reported metacognitive abilities than TD adults. These findings suggest the potential for diminished correspondence between metacognitive monitoring and memory accuracy despite high self-confidence in metacognition in ASD
Summary
Free recall[20,21,22], and often intact in tests of cued recall or r ecognition[2,7,23]. Reductions in selective attention during encoding could lead to the formation of memories that include both task-relevant and irrelevant details, a process known as hyperbinding[36,37] Consistent with this idea and the age-related inhibitory control h ypothesis38, we[39] have shown that TD older adults, compared to young TD adults, show reduced context memory accuracy and increased binding of distracting contextual information (i.e., ‘hyper-binding’)[36,37]. Grainger et al.[53] found less accurate FOK judgments in adults with ASD but greater self-reported metacognitive abilities than TD adults These findings suggest the potential for diminished correspondence between metacognitive monitoring and memory accuracy despite high self-confidence in metacognition in ASD. Mixed results and minimal preliminary findings from adult samples make it currently unclear whether difficulties observed in contextual metamemory performance would be seen in adults with ASD in the present study
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