THE ACCESSIBILITY OF SPECIFIC AND GENERAL AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY (ABM) IN ADULTS WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS (ASD): THE ROLE OF GOAL PURSUIT

Background: ABM is stored hierarchically, at both general and specific levels of representation. Furthermore, it has been proposed that the self is the structure around which ABMs are organised (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). Deficits in ABM retrieval have been consistently reported in ASD (Crane & Goddard, in press). Considering that ASD is associated with difficulty in processing self-referential information (Toichi et al., 2002), this may therefore be one factor underlying the memory difficulties in ASD.

Objectives: Research demonstrating an ABM deficit in ASD has focused on memories for specific events. Therefore, the first aim of this study was to examine ABM in ASD at both general and specific levels of representation. The second aim was to examine whether the ABM difficulties in ASD relate to difficulties in using the self as an effective memory cue, focusing on the role of personal goals in memory retrieval.

Methods: 24 adults with ASD and 24 age, gender and IQ matched controls participated in this study. Participants identified a series of goals that they were currently pursuing, and then these goals (and a series of randomly selected non-goals) were used as memory cues in a specific event-memory task. A computer-based task was used to investigate access to general event memory.

Results: The ASD group took significantly longer to access both general and specific ABMs and retrieved fewer specific ABMs, relative to controls. However, contrary to predictions, the ASD and control groups displayed similar patterns of results regarding the use of personal goals as memory cues.  

Conclusions: Difficulties in accessing ABMs were found for both general and specific memories in ASD. However the results also suggest that the ASD group were able to use the self to structure memory recall. These results are discussed with respect to theoretical models of ABM (e.g. Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000).