Children With Autism Experience Memory Difficulties

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

The study, published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, settles a controversy about memory function in autistic children, demonstrating that their memory difficulties outweigh their ability to generate social memories. According to the researchers who conducted the study, the findings should encourage broader thinking about autism in youngsters and treatment of the developmental illness.

“Many high-functioning kids with autism go to mainstream schools and receive the same instruction as other kids,” said lead author Jin Liu, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar in psychiatry and behavioral sciences. Memory is a key predictor of academic success, said Liu, adding that memory challenges may put kids with autism at a disadvantage.

According to the researchers, the study’s findings create a philosophical discussion concerning the brain roots of autism. Social difficulties are regarded as a key aspect of autism, although memory deficits may have a substantial role in the capacity to engage socially.

“Social cognition cannot occur without reliable memory,” said senior author Vinod Menon, Ph.D., the Rachael L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

“Social behaviors are complex, and they involve multiple brain processes, including associating faces and voices to particular contexts, which require robust episodic memory,” Menon said. “Impairments in forming these associative memory traces could form one of the foundational elements in autism.”

Memory tests that are comprehensive

Autism is characterized by social deficits and confined, repetitive activities, affecting around one in every 36 children. The illness has a wide range of symptoms. The most severely affected persons are unable to communicate or care for themselves, and around one-third of people with autism have intellectual disabilities. On the other end of the spectrum, many persons with high-functioning autism have normal or high IQs, finish college, and work in a variety of industries.

Children with autism have difficulties remembering faces, according to research. Some studies have suggested that children with autism had broader memory problems, however these investigations were small and did not adequately test participants’ memory ability. They included youngsters of various ages and intelligence levels, both of which influence memory.

The current study included 25 children aged 8 to 12 years old with high-functioning autism and normal IQ, as well as a control group of 29 typically developing youngsters of similar ages and IQs.

All participants underwent a full test of their memory skills, which included the capacity to remember faces, written content, and non-social images, or photos with no people in them. The scientists assessed participants’ capacity to reliably recognize information (determining whether they had previously seen an image or heard a word) and recall it (describing or reproducing aspects of previously seen or heard information). The researchers assessed individuals’ recall after varied periods of time. All participants also had functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of their brains to see how memory-related areas are linked to one another.

Memory problems are driven by distinct brain networks

According to the study, children with autism had more trouble remembering faces than typically developing children.

According to the findings, they also had difficulty recalling non-social material. Their results for instant and delayed verbal memory, immediate visual recall, and delayed verbal recognition were lower on tests involving phrases they read and non-social photographs they watched.

“The study participants with autism had fairly high IQ, comparable to typically developing participants, but we still observed very obvious general memory impairments in this group,” said Liu, adding that the research team had not anticipated such large differences.

Memory skills were constant across typically developing children. If a child had an excellent recall for faces, he or she also had a high memory for non-social information.

This wasn’t the case in children with autism. “Among children with autism, some kids seem to have both impairments and some have more severe impairment in one area of memory or the other,” Liu said.

The researchers had not expected this result, either.

“It was a surprising finding that these two dimensions of memory are both dysfunctional, in ways that seem to be unrelated—and that maps onto our analysis of the brain circuitry,” Menon said.

The brain scans revealed that different brain networks generate different forms of memory problems in children with autism.

Connections in a network based on the hippocampus—a tiny structure deep within the brain known to govern memory—were found to predict the ability of children with autism to maintain non-social memories. Face memory in autistic children, on the other hand, was predicted by a distinct set of connections concentrated on the posterior cingulate cortex, a crucial part of the brain’s default mode network that plays roles in social cognition and distinguishing oneself from others.

“The findings suggest that general and face-memory challenges have two underlying sources in the brain which contribute to a broader profile of memory impairments in autism,” Menon said.

Children with autism had over-connected circuits in both networks as compared to typically developing children. Other investigations of brain networks in children with autism have discovered over-connectivity, which is likely due to insufficient selective pruning of neural circuits.

According to Menon, new autism therapies should account for the breadth of memory impairments discovered in the research, as well as how these challenges affect social skills. “This is important for functioning in both the real world and academic settings.”

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