This study applied the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate frontal activity in autism when performing verbal fluency test and emotion recall task. We recruited 32 autistic adults without intellectual disability and 30 typically-developing controls (TDC). Prefrontal hemodynamic changes were evaluated by fNIRS when the…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to analyze secondary data from three mother-child dyads in order to evaluate how family photographs and training in naturalistic strategies affected the way mothers reminisce with their children with autism spectrum disorders. Method: A secondary analysis (i.e., collateral effects) of a single-case dataset…

This study explored the impacts of enactment and motor imagery on working memory for instructions in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), children with intellectual disability (ID) and typically developing (TD) children. The participants were asked to hear (hearing condition), imagine enacting (motor imagery condition) and actually enact…

It is unclear whether children with autism spectrum disorders have atypical semantic fluency and lower memory for the semantics of words. Therefore, we examined semantic typicality, fluency and recall for the categories of fruits and animals in 60 children with autism aged 7-15 years (boys: 48/girls: 12) compared to 60 typically developing…

Challenges to verbal encoding may affect the ability of autistic individuals to express their ideas. Therefore, visuospatial expression may represent a person's knowledge and skills more accurately than spoken language. To test this hypothesis, we asked seven autistic adults to linguistically retell and visuospatially reenact several animated…

To investigate the early development of episodic memory and future thinking in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), we selected 94 participants each from a group of ASD and typically developing (TD) preschoolers. They were required to remember newly-acquired knowledge sources and anticipate action timings necessary for future events. Five-year-old…

Twenty-seven autistic children and 32 typically developing (TD) peers were questioned about an experienced event after a two-week delay and again after a two-month delay, using the Revised National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Investigative Interview Protocol. Recall prompts elicited more detailed and more accurate…

Previous studies indicate that autobiographical memory is impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Successful recollection of information referring to one's own person requires the intact ability to re-activate representation of the past self. In the current fMRI study we investigated process of conscious reflection on the…

The decline in self-related memory in ASD was investigated by using encoding, forgetting, and source monitoring. Participants memorized action sentences verbally, observationally, or by enacted encoding. Then, they underwent recall, recognition, and source monitoring memory tests immediately and 1 week later. If the information were properly…

Autobiographical memory (AM) is a socially-relevant cognitive skill. Little is known regarding AM during early childhood in ASD. Parent-child reminiscing conversations predict AM in non-ASD populations but have rarely been examined in autism. To address this gap, 17 preschool-aged children (ages 4-6 years) with ASD and 21 children without ASD…

We studied episodic memory and future thinking for self-relevant and other-relevant events at different levels of retrieval support, theory of mind, and delay discounting in ASD children and adolescents (ASDs). Compared to typically developing controls, ASDs produced fewer internal (episodic) but a similar number of external (semantic) details…

Possible gender differences in manifestations of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were examined using data on production of narratives. The Expression, Reception and Recall of Narrative Instrument (ERRNI; Bishop, Expression, Reception and Recall of Narrative Instrument, Harcourt assessment, London, 2004) was administered to a sample of matched…

Persons with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) demonstrate good memory for single items but difficulties remembering contextual information related to these items. Recently, we found compromised explicit but intact implicit retrieval of object-location information in ASD (Ring et al. "Autism Res" 8(5):609-619, 2015). Eye-movement data…

Deficits in episodic free-recall memory performance have been reported in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), yet best practice dictates that child witness/victim interviews commence with a free-recall account. No "tools" exist to support children with ASD to freely recall episodic information. Here, the efficacy of a novel…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show atypicalities in episodic memory (Boucher et al. in Psychological Bulletin, 138 (3), 458-496, 2012). We asked participants to recall the colours of a set of studied line drawings (episodic judgement), or to recognize line drawings alone (semantic judgement). Cycowicz et al. ("Journal of…