Background.-The degree to which individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) evidence impairments in episodic memory relative to their typically developing (TD) counterparts remains unclear. According to a prominent view, ASD is associated with deficits in encoding associations between items and recollecting precise context details. Here, we evaluated behavioral and neural evidence for this impaired relational binding hypothesis using a task involving relational encoding and recollection during fMRI.Methods.-Adolescents and young adults (N ASD =47; N TD =60) performed the Relational and Item-Specific Encoding (RiSE) task during fMRI, including item and associative recognition testing. We modelled functional recruitment within the medial temporal lobes (MTL), and connectivity between MTL and the posterior medial (PM) network thought to underlie relational memory. The impaired relational binding model would predict a behavioral deficit driven by aberrant recruitment and connectivity of MTL and the PM network.Results.-The ASD and TD groups showed indistinguishable item and associative recognition performance. During relational encoding, the ASD group demonstrated increased hippocampal recruitment, and decreased connectivity between MTL and PM regions relative to TD. Within ASD, hippocampal recruitment and MTL-PM connectivity were inversely correlated.Conclusions.-The lack of a behavioral deficit in ASD does not support the impaired relational binding hypothesis. Instead, the current data suggest that increased recruitment of the hippocampus compensates for decreased MTL-PM connectivity to support preserved episodic

Adaptive behavior requires learning about the structure of one’s environment to derive optimal action policies, and previous studies have documented transfer of such structural knowledge to bias choices in new environments. Here, we asked whether people could also acquire and transfer more abstract knowledge across different task environments, specifically expectations about cognitive control demands. Over three experiments, participants (Amazon Mechanical Turk workers; N = ~80 adults per group) performed a probabilistic card-sorting task in environments of either a low or high volatility of task rule changes (requiring low or high cognitive flexibility, respectively) before transitioning to a medium-volatility environment. Using reinforcement-learning modeling, we consistently found that previous exposure to high task rule volatilities led to faster adaptation to rule changes in the subsequent transfer phase. These transfers of expectations about cognitive flexibility demands were both task independent (Experiment 2) and stimulus independent (Experiment 3), thus demonstrating the formation and generalization of environmental structure knowledge to guide cognitive control.

Increased attention to threat is considered a core feature of anxiety. However, there are multiple mechanisms of attention and multiple types of threat, and the relationships among attention, threat, and anxiety are poorly understood. In the present study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to separately isolate attentional selection (N2pc) and suppression (PD) of pictorial threats (photos of weapons, snakes, etc.) and conditioned threats (colored shapes paired with electric shock). In a sample of 48 young adults, both threat types were initially selected for increased attention (an N2pc), but only conditioned threats elicited subsequent suppression (a PD) and a reaction time (RT) bias. Levels of trait anxiety were unrelated to N2pc amplitude, but increased anxiety was associated with larger PDs (i.e., greater suppression) and reduced RT bias to conditioned threats. These results suggest that anxious individuals do not pay more attention to threats but rather engage more attentional suppression to overcome threats.

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