Memory integration in the autobiographical narratives of individuals with autism

Brezis, Rachel S.

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2015.00076

Cited by 28 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Researchers explain the deficits in personal event narratives of persons with ASD in regard to deficits in autobiographical memory (Bowler, Gaigg, & Lind, 2011;Brezis, 2015). Telling a story using a picture book is a very different task from that of talking about an event that has been experienced personally.…”

Section: Asdmentioning

confidence: 99%

Telling Tales: Personal Event Narratives and Life Stories

Westby¹,

Culatta

2016

LSHSS

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To promote development of personal event narratives and life stories, speech-language pathologists can help clients retrieve information about interesting events, provide experiences worthy of narrating, and draw upon published narratives to serve as model texts. Clinicians can also address four interrelated processes in intervention: reminiscing, reflecting, making coherent connections, and signaling the plot structure. Furthermore, they can activate metacognitive awareness of how evaluations of experiences, coherence, and plot structure are signaled in well-formed personal event narratives and life stories.

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Section: Asdmentioning

confidence: 99%

Telling Tales: Personal Event Narratives and Life Stories

Westby¹,

Culatta

2016

LSHSS

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“…Indeed, there have been multiple demonstrations that semantic memory (Bowler et al, 2000, 2009; Minshew and Goldstein, 1993; Salmond et al, Aug, 2005; Toichi and Kamio, 2002) is largely spared in individuals with ASD; although they exhibit deficits in episodic memory related to contextual details of events (Bowler et al, 2011, 2004; Gaigg et al, 2008; Hala et al, 2005; Lind and Bowler, Sep, 2009; O’Shea et al, 2005), the spatio-temporal sequence of events (Poirier et al, 2011), and contextual information that is autobiographical or more self-referential (Brezis, 2015; Crane and Goddard, 2008; Henderson et al, 2009; Lind and Bowler, 2008; Maister et al, 2013). Based on the aforementioned findings, and on early neuropathology studies (Bauman and Kemper, 1985), it is widely believed that ASD is a disorder of the hippocampus (Salmond et al, Aug, 2005) involving impairment in the ability to flexibly process episodically-defined associations between items.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive control and episodic memory in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders

et al. 2016

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Introduction To further investigate manifestations of episodic memory impairments in adolescents, we examined the role of encoding on recognition of stimuli in conditions designed to emphasize their item-specific versus relational characteristics in a group of 12–18 year olds with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We also examined how strategic learning and memory processes, verbal abilities, attention, and age were associated with recognition in this group. Materials and method Twenty two high functioning adolescents with ASD (mean age = 15 years; SD = 1.8; range = 12.2–17.9), and 26 age, gender, and IQ-matched adolescents with typical development (TYP) (mean age = 14.7 years; SD = 1.9; range = 12.3–17.8) completed the Relational and Item-Specific Encoding task (RiSE), the California Verbal Learning Test-Children’s Version (CVLT-C), the Wechsler Abbreviated Scales of Intelligence, and the Connors’ Parent Rating Scale-Revised. Univariate statistical analyses were performed. Results The ASD group showed poorer performance on strategic memory assessed by the CVLT-C. Surprisingly, on the RiSE, ASD showed poorer discriminability for objects encoded in item-specific versus relational encoding conditions and were more impaired in familiarity (after relational encoding) than in recollection. ASD also did not show the hypothesized association between item and associative recognition and CVLT-C performance found in TYP. Instead, in the ASD group recognition was associated with increased age. Conclusions Findings from the RiSE task demonstrated that adolescents with ASD do not always exhibit impaired memory for relational information as commonly believed. Instead, memory was worse when cognitive control demands were high, when encoding focused on specific item features, and when familiarity was used to retrieve relational information. Recognition also was better in older participants. This suggests that learning and memory deficits in adolescents with ASD, may not be due primarily to failed relational binding processes in the hippocampus but, rather to disrupted strategic memory and familiarity processes associated with the prefrontal and perirhinal cortices. These findings demonstrate the importance and utility of using well-validated cognitive neuroscience tasks and of considering the ages of participants when comparing the neural underpinnings of different memory processes in both typical and atypical populations.

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“…Other authors attributed deficits in autobiographical memory in autism to a failure in the development of self-identity ( 4 ) or to impairments in Theory of Mind and working memory ( 5 ). Also, memories of people with autism were shown to include fewer social and emotional details ( 10 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Memories of Individuals on the Autism Spectrum Assessed Using Online Self-Reports

et al. 2016

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“When I was one and a half years old, I was on a ferry lying on red seats” – while several autobiographical accounts by people with autism reveal vivid memories of early childhood, the vast amount of experimental investigations found deficits in personal autobiographic memory in autism. To assess this contradiction empirically, we implemented an online questionnaire on early childhood events to compare people on the autism spectrum (AS) and non-autistic people with respect to their earliest autobiographical episodic memories and the earliest semantic know event as told by another person. Results indicate that people on the AS do not differ from non-autistic people in the age of their earliest know events but remember events from an earlier age in childhood and with more sensory details, contradicting the assumption of an overall deficit in personal episodic memory in autism. Furthermore, our results emphasize the supporting influence of language for memory formation and give evidence for an important role of sensory features in memories of people on the AS.

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Memory integration in the autobiographical narratives of individuals with autism

Cited by 28 publications

References 44 publications

Telling Tales: Personal Event Narratives and Life Stories

Telling Tales: Personal Event Narratives and Life Stories

Cognitive control and episodic memory in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders

Early Memories of Individuals on the Autism Spectrum Assessed Using Online Self-Reports

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