School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, 654 Cherry St. NW, Atlanta, GA, 30332-0170, USA.
Sci Rep. 2021 Oct 14;11(1):20482. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-99898-2.
Research on memory in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) finds increased difficulty encoding contextual associations in episodic memory and suggests executive dysfunction (e.g., selective attention, cognitive flexibility) and deficient metacognitive monitoring as potential contributing factors. Findings from our lab suggest that age-related impairments in selective attention contribute to those in context memory accuracy and older adults tended to show dependence in context memory accuracy between relevant and irrelevant context details (i.e., hyper-binding). Using an aging framework, we tested the effects of selective attention on context memory in a sample of 23 adults with ASD and 23 typically developed adults. Participants studied grayscale objects flanked by two types of contexts (color, scene) on opposing sides and were told to attend to only one object-context relationship, ignoring the other context. At test, participants made object and context recognition decisions and judgment of confidence decisions allowing for an evaluation of context memory performance, hyper-binding, and metacognitive performance for context judgments in a single task. Results showed that adults with ASD performed similarly to typically developed adults on all measures. These findings suggest that context memory performance is not always disrupted in adults with ASD, even when demands on selective attention are high. We discuss the need for continued research to evaluate episodic memory in a wider variety of adults with ASD.
自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的记忆研究发现，在情景记忆中编码上下文关联的难度增加，并表明执行功能（例如选择性注意、认知灵活性）和元认知监测不足是潜在的促成因素。我们实验室的研究结果表明，与年龄相关的选择性注意缺陷会导致情景记忆准确性下降，而老年人在相关和不相关情景细节的情景记忆准确性上往往表现出依赖性（即过度绑定）。我们使用老龄化框架，在 23 名 ASD 成人和 23 名正常发育成人的样本中测试了选择性注意对情景记忆的影响。参与者研究了灰度物体，其两侧有两种类型的上下文（颜色、场景），并被告知只关注一种物体-上下文关系，忽略另一种上下文。在测试中，参与者做出物体和上下文识别决策，并对上下文判断做出信心判断，允许在单个任务中评估上下文记忆表现、过度绑定和上下文判断的元认知表现。结果表明，ASD 成人在所有测量指标上的表现与正常发育成人相似。这些发现表明，即使在选择性注意要求很高的情况下，ASD 成人的情景记忆表现并不总是受到干扰。我们讨论了需要继续研究，以评估更广泛的 ASD 成人的情景记忆。
