Abstract
Visual attention and visual working memory exert severe capacity limitations on cognitive processing. Impairments in both functions may exacerbate the social and communication deficits seen in children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study characterizes spatial working memory and visual attention in school-aged children with high-functioning autism. Children with ASD, and age, gender, and IQmatched typically developing (TD) children performed two tasks: a spatial working memory task and an attentive tracking task. Compared with TD children, children with ASD showed a more pronounced deficit in the spatial working memory task than the attentive tracking task, even though the latter placed significant demands on sustained attention, location updating, and distractor inhibition. Because both groups of children were sensitive to configuration mismatches between the sample and test arrays, the spatial working memory deficit was not due to atypical organization of spatial working memory. These findings show that attention and working memory are dissociable, and that children with ASD show a specific deficit in buffering visual information across temporal discontinuity.
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