City Research Online

Abstract

This study investigated semantic and episodic memory in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), using a task which assessed recognition and self-other source memory. Children with ASD showed undiminished recognition memory but significantly diminished source memory, relative to age- and verbal ability-matched comparison children. Both children with and without ASD showed an “enactment effect”, demonstrating significantly better recognition and source memory for self-performed actions than other-person-performed actions. Within the comparison group, theory-of-mind (ToM) task performance was significantly correlated with source memory, specifically for other-person-performed actions (after statistically controlling for verbal ability). Within the ASD group, ToM task performance was not significantly correlated with source memory (after controlling for verbal ability). Possible explanations for these relations between source memory and ToM are considered.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10803-009-0735-2
Publisher Keywords:	Autism spectrum disorder, episodic memory, recognition memory, semantic memory, source memory, theory-of-mind
Subjects:	R Medicine > RC Internal medicine
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Language & Communication Science

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