Children with autism have memory difficulties: Study

According to new research from the Stanford School of Medicine, children with autism have memory problems that limit not only their ability to remember faces but also their ability to retain other types of information. . The study found that these deficits are reflected in unique wiring patterns in children’s brains.

The research, which will be published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, clarifies the debate about memory function in children with autism, showing that their memory struggles exceed their ability to form social memories. According to the scientists who conducted the study, the findings should spur broader thinking about the treatment of autism and developmental disorders in children.

“Many high-functioning children with autism attend mainstream schools and receive the same education as other children,” said lead author Jin Liu, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in psychiatry and behavioral science. Memory is a key predictor of academic success, Liu said, adding that memory challenges may put children with autism at a disadvantage.

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The study’s findings also raise a philosophical debate about the neural origins of autism, the researchers said. Social challenges are recognized as a core feature of autism, but it is possible that memory loss contributes significantly to the ability to connect socially.

Senior authors Vinod Menon, PhD, Rachel L. and Walter F. “Social cognition cannot occur without reliable memory,” said Nichols, MD, professor and professor of psychiatry and behavioral science.

“Social behaviors are complex, and they involve multiple brain processes, including associating faces and voices with particular contexts, which require strong episodic memory,” Menon said. “The impairment in forming these associative memory traces may constitute one of the fundamental elements in autism.”

comprehensive memory test

Autism, which affects one in every 36 children, is characterized by social impairments and restricted, repetitive behaviors. This situation exists on a wide spectrum. The most severely affected individuals cannot speak or care for themselves, and approximately one-third of people with autism have intellectual impairment. On the other end of the spectrum, many people with high-functioning autism have normal or high IQs, complete higher education and work in a variety of fields.

Research has shown that children with autism have difficulty remembering faces. Some research has also suggested that children with autism have widespread memory difficulties, but these studies were small and did not fully assess participants’ memory abilities. These included children with a wide range of ages and IQs, both of which affect memory.

To clarify the effect of autism on memory, the new study included 25 children with high-functioning autism and normal IQ, ages 8 to 12, and 29 typically developing children of similar age and IQ. A control group was included.

All participants completed a comprehensive assessment of their memory skills, including their ability to remember faces; written material; and non-social photos, or photos without a person. The scientists tested participants’ ability to accurately recognize information (recognizing whether they had previously seen an image or heard a word) and to remember it (detailing or reproducing information they had previously heard). seen or heard). The researchers tested participants’ memory after delays of varying lengths. All participants also received functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of their brains to assess how the areas involved in memory connected to each other.

Specific brain networks enhance memory challenges

The study found that children with autism had more difficulty remembering faces than typically developing children, in line with prior research. The research showed that they also struggled with recalling non-social information.

In tests of the sentences they read and the non-social pictures they viewed, they had lower scores for immediate and delayed verbal recall, immediate visual recall, and delayed verbal recognition.

“Study participants with autism had significantly higher IQs than typically developing participants, but we still observed very clear general memory loss in this group,” Liu said. He said the research team had not expected such a large difference.

In the typically developing children, memory skills were consistent. If a child has a good memory for faces, he or she is also good at remembering non-social information. This was not the case in children with autism. “Among children with autism, some children have deficits in both types and some have more severe deficits in one or the other area of ​​memory,” Liu said.

The researchers also did not expect this result.

“It was a surprising finding that these two dimensions of memory are both dysfunctional, in ways that seem to be unrelated – and this hinges on our analysis of brain circuitry,” Menon said. Brain scans revealed that, in children with autism, different brain networks lead to different types of memory difficulties.

For children with autism, the ability to retain non-social memories was predicted by connections in a network centered on the hippocampus – a small structure deep inside the brain known to regulate memory. But facial memory in children with autism was predicted by a different set of connections centered on the posterior cingulate cortex, a key area of ​​the brain’s default mode network that is involved in social cognition and differentiating oneself from other people. There is a role.

“The findings suggest that general and facial memory challenges have two underlying sources in the brain that contribute to the broad profile of memory impairments in autism,” Menon said.

In both networks, the brains of children with autism appeared to have more connected circuits than those of typically developing children. Over-connectivity – possibly due to too little selective pruning of neural circuits – has been found in other studies of brain networks in children with autism.

New autism treatments must take into account the prevalence of memory difficulties uncovered by research, as well as how these challenges affect social skills, Menon said. “This is important for functioning in the real world and in academic settings.”