Working memory, language skills, and autism symptomatology

Area of Science:

• Neurodevelopmental disorders
• Cognitive psychology
• Autism spectrum disorder research

Background:

• Conflicting findings exist regarding working memory (WM) impairments in autism spectrum disorders (ASD).
• Visuospatial WM deficits are more consistently reported than verbal WM deficits in ASD.
• Discrepancies may stem from sample characteristics, WM domain, and task complexity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate visuospatial and verbal WM in children with high-functioning autism (HFA) compared to typically developing peers.
• To examine the relationship between WM abilities, language skills, and autism symptom severity.
• To clarify the impact of task complexity on WM performance in HFA.

Main Methods:

• A controlled study involving 18 children with HFA and 18 typically developing children (ages 9-17).
• Participants were matched on gender, age, IQ, and language abilities.
• Standardized visuospatial and verbal working memory tasks were administered.

Main Results:

• The HFA group exhibited significant impairments across both visuospatial and verbal WM domains.
• Working memory abilities significantly predicted variance in language skills and autism symptom severity, independent of nonverbal cognition.
• No performance differences were observed across different WM tasks within either the HFA or typically developing groups.

Conclusions:

• High-functioning autism is associated with broad working memory limitations.
• Verbal WM deficits in HFA are present even in simpler tasks like phonological WM and are exacerbated by increased task complexity and linguistic demands.
• Working memory capacity is a crucial factor influencing language and symptom severity in HFA.