Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by atypical perception, including processing that is biased toward local details rather than global configurations. This bias may impact on memory. The present study examined the effect of this perception on both implicit (Experiment 1) and explicit (Experiment 2) memory in conditions that promote either local or global processing. The first experiment consisted of an object identification priming task using two distinct encoding conditions: one favoring local processing (Local condition) and the other favoring global processing (Global condition) of drawings. The second experiment focused on episodic (explicit) memory with two different cartoon recognition tasks that favored either local (i.e., processing specific details) or a global processing (i.e., processing each cartoon as a whole). In addition, all the participants underwent a general clinical cognitive assessment aimed at documenting their cognitive profile and enabling correlational analyses with experimental memory tasks. Seventeen participants with ASD and 17 typically developing (TD) controls aged from 10 to 16 years participated to the first experiment and 13 ASD matched with 13 TD participants were included for the second experiment. Experiment 1 confirmed the preservation of priming effects in ASD but, unlike the Comparison group, the ASD group did not increase his performance as controls after a globally oriented processing. Experiment 2 revealed that local processing led to difficulties in discriminating lures from targets in a recognition task when both lures and targets shared common details. The correlation analysis revealed that these difficulties were associated with processing speed and inhibition. These preliminary results suggest that natural perceptual processes oriented toward local information in ASD may impact upon their implicit memory by preventing globally oriented processing in time-limited conditions and induce confusion between explicit memories that share common details.
Highlights
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by atypical visual perceptual abilities with superior performance on many perceptual tasks that require local processing, including the block design task (Caron et al, 2006; Kuo and Eack, 2020), the embedded figures task (Shah and Frith, 1983; Jolliffe and Baron-Cohen, 1997), visual search (Plaisted et al, 1998; O’Riordan et al, 2001) or feature discrimination (O’Riordan and Plaisted, 2001)
For our implicit memory task, we hypothesize that in the condition favoring local precedence participants with ASD would perform significantly better compared to comparison participants
The difference in performance between the two experimental conditions is similar to that of the comparison participants. Both groups of participants were less accurate in processing the size of the whole target relative to the standard-sized frame placed beside the computer (Global condition) than they were at processing a dot (Local condition)
Summary
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by atypical visual perceptual abilities with superior performance on many perceptual tasks that require local processing, including the block design task (Caron et al, 2006; Kuo and Eack, 2020), the embedded figures task (Shah and Frith, 1983; Jolliffe and Baron-Cohen, 1997), visual search (Plaisted et al, 1998; O’Riordan et al, 2001) or feature discrimination (O’Riordan and Plaisted, 2001). The second theory focuses on enhanced low and mid-level processes of perception that allow ASD people to detect and memorize the surface properties of visual and auditory patterns, and is summarized in the Enhanced Perceptual Functioning model (EPF, Mottron et al, 2006) This theory postulates that people with ASD have a natural bias to process stimuli locally confirmed by neuroanatomical and behavioral findings (Mottron et al, 2013a; Chung and Son, 2020). Visual search superiority may be related to a tendency to over-focus coupled with abnormal attentional disengagement In this context, the visual local processing bias may result from difficulties in shifting from salient details to the global shape. When such a shift is required, individuals with ASD would need longer to disengage their attention to perform as typical controls
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