Beck Ann-Kathrin, Souza Cristiane, Garrido Margarida V, Barahona-Correa J Bernardo, Carmo Joana C, Lachmann Thomas, Czernochowski Daniela
University Kaiserslautern-Landau RPTU, Kaiserslautern, Germany.
Iscte - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.
Sci Rep. 2025 Sep 17;15(1):32577. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-19086-4.
This study examined the effects of item typicality (typical vs. atypical), encoding type (categorical vs. perceptual), and neurodivergence (autistic vs. neurotypical male adults) on memory discrimination and associated neuronal patterns. Despite similar overall memory discrimination performance between groups, analyses of event-related potentials revealed that neurotypicals displayed an early ERP effect, suggesting reliance on familiarity-driven processes. In contrast, autistic participants showed a later ERP modulation, indicating a reliance on recollection-based processes. Notably, relying on either familiarity or recollection influenced the activation in the post-old/new-response period, in which only neurotypical adults needed to reinstate item details for the subsequent Remember-Know-Guess (R-K-G) judgments. These findings suggest that autistic adults may recruit different cognitive processes to achieve memory performance comparable to neurotypical adults. Additionally, our results suggest that item typicality interacts with encoding type in modulating the cognitive processes underlying memory retrieval and their neural correlates in both autistic and neurotypical adults. The study highlights the need to investigate the role of semantic processes in episodic memory retrieval in both neurotypical and autistic individuals.
本研究考察了项目典型性（典型与非典型）、编码类型（分类与知觉）以及神经差异（自闭症男性成年人与神经典型男性成年人）对记忆辨别及相关神经元模式的影响。尽管两组之间总体记忆辨别表现相似，但对事件相关电位的分析显示，神经典型个体表现出早期ERP效应，表明依赖于熟悉度驱动的过程。相比之下，自闭症参与者表现出较晚的ERP调制，表明依赖于基于回忆的过程。值得注意的是，依赖熟悉度或回忆会影响旧/新反应后阶段的激活，其中只有神经典型成年人需要恢复项目细节以进行后续的记住-知道-猜测（R-K-G）判断。这些发现表明，自闭症成年人可能会采用不同的认知过程来实现与神经典型成年人相当的记忆表现。此外，我们的结果表明，在调节自闭症和神经典型成年人记忆检索的潜在认知过程及其神经关联方面，项目典型性与编码类型相互作用。该研究强调了在神经典型和自闭症个体中研究语义过程在情景记忆检索中的作用的必要性。
