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Phonological and Visuospatial Working Memory in Autism Spectrum Disorders

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Abstract

We evaluated phonological and visuospatial working memory (WM) in autism spectrum disorders. Autistic children and typically developing children were compared. We used WM tasks that measured phonological and visuospatial WM up to the capacity limit of each children. Overall measures of WM did not show differences between autistic children and control children. However, when the recall of children was examined in detail, autistic children showed reduced phonological WM compared with control children. Moreover, phonological and visuospatial WM did not increase with the age of autistic children while a development of phonological and visuospatial WM with age was found in control children. The pattern of results is discussed in terms of previous studies about WM and autism.

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Notes

  1. Digit span as an overall measure of WM. The digit span task is an omnibus measure that indexes working memory amplitude (verbal WM) and many other aspects such as word knowledge (e.g., magnitude information associated to the digits) and executive functioning (e.g., updating information in the backward version). For example, digit span shows correlation with many other executive and working memory tasks such as sentence and word reading tasks (Lehto 1996, for a systematic examination). Moreover, the recall of digits in the digit span task shows an advantage due to the increased frequency with which digits, compared to other verbal material, appear as random sequences in natural language (see Jones & Macken 2015, for a critical review). In addition, the recall of digits or words is better than the recall of nonwords (Hulme et al. 1997). This observation seems to indicate that linguistic familiar material enhances integrity of the items to be recalled probably due to the use of long-term lexico-phonological representations (e.g., Schweickert 1993). All these aspects guided us to consider the digit span task as an overall control measure of WM while we performed a detailed examination of the visuospatial and phonological WM with tasks that controlled for some factors such as word knowledge, familiarity of the material and frequency of items to be recalled (e.g., in the phonological span task meaningless CVC trigrams were used).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Research Project PSI2012–32287 to P. Macizo) and Junta de Andalucía (Biomedical and Heath Science Research Project PI-0410-2014 to M. F. Soriano).

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Every author of the manuscript has made substantial contributions to all of the aspects of this work and approval of the final submitted version of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Psicología Experimental, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de Granada, Campus de Cartuja, s/n. 18071, Granada, Spain

    P. Macizo & N. Paredes

  2. Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center, CIMCYC, Granada, Spain

    P. Macizo

  3. Hospital Universitario San Agustín de Linares, Unidad de Salud Mental, Avda. S. Cristóbal, s/n. 23700, Linares, Jaén, Spain

    M. F. Soriano

  4. Centro Clínico Marbella Psicología, Avd. Ricardo Soriano, 40-42. 1°C, Marbella, Málaga, Spain

    N. Paredes

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Macizo, P., Soriano, M.F. & Paredes, N. Phonological and Visuospatial Working Memory in Autism Spectrum Disorders. J Autism Dev Disord 46, 2956–2967 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-016-2835-0

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