Eye Movements of Spatial Working Memory Encoding in Children with and without Autism: Chunking Processing and Reference Preference.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience spatial working memory deficits and show different encoding mechanisms from typical developing (TD) peers. To effectively describe the encoding strategies of those with ASD and highlight their characteristics in cognitive processing, we adopted improved change detection tasks and added eye-movement indicators to investigate the chunking function and reference preference of children with and without ASD. The current study included 20 participants with ASD aged 8-16 and 20 TD children matched for age, gender, and intelligence. Experiment 1 used high/low-structured change detection tasks, and eye-movement indexes were recorded as they memorized the locations of the items to investigate spatial chunking strategies. In Experiment 2, changes in eye movement patterns were observed by adding a frame of reference. The results suggested different encoding strategies in ASD and TD individuals. The ASD group showed local processing bias and had difficulty adopting chunking strategies in spatial working memory. Eye-movement analysis suggested that they rarely showed integrated information processing tendency observed in TD children. Moreover, as a compensatory processing, they were more likely to use the frame of reference. In this study, we compared the spatial chunking strategies and reference preference of children with and without ASD, and eye-movement analysis was used to investigate the processing mechanism. These findings are significant for research on cognitive characteristics of ASD and provide a new focus for working memory training in children with ASD. LAY SUMMARY: The current study suggests that children with autism spectrum disorder are poorer at organizing items into chunks in spatial working memory, but rely more on reference frames. If the purpose of location memory is to strengthen the adaptability of children with autism, it should provide them with more clues or references. If it is for the purpose of intervention such as cognitive training, it should guide them to integrate information to improve the basic cognitive processing efficiency. Autism Res 2021, 14: 897-910. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC.