Do high-functioning people with autism spectrum disorder spontaneously use event knowledge to selectively attend to and remember context-relevant aspects in scenes?
This study combined an event schema approach with top-down processing perspectives to investigate whether high-functioning children and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) spontaneously attend to and remember context-relevant aspects of scenes. Participants read one story of story-pairs (e.g., burglary or tea party). They then inspected a scene (living room) of which some objects were relevant in that context, irrelevant (related to the non-emphasized event) or neutral (scene-schema related). During immediate and delayed recall, only the (TD) groups selectively recalled context-relevant objects, and significantly more context-relevant objects than the ASD groups. Gaze-tracking suggests that one factor in these memory differences may be diminished top-down effects of event schemas on initial attention (first ten fixations) to relevant items in ASD.
MRC Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, De Crespigny Park, Denmark Hill, London SE5 8AF, UK. eva.loth@kcl.ac.uk
Eva
E
Loth
Juan Carlós
JC
Gómez
Francesca
F
Happé
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D002659:Child Development Disorders, Pervasive / Q000523:psychology*; D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D019359:Knowledge; D008568:Memory; D012919:Social Behavior; D014796:Visual Perception