Do emotionally salient cues improve prospective memory performance in children and adolescents with autism?

Prospective memory (PM) describes the ability to initiate and perform a planned action after a delay. Previous studies suggest reduced PM in autism spectrum disorder (ASD); especially when tasks put high demands on executive control resources. Increasing cue salience by presenting emotional cues improves PM performance in non-autistic populations.

To explore whether children with ASD, whose processing of emotionally connoted information might differ from that of typically developing children, may also benefit from this type of salience in PM tasks.

Twenty-five children with and 25 children without ASD completed a 1-back ongoing task into which an event-based PM task was embedded. Emotional salience of PM cues was varied.

Children with ASD performed as well as children without ASD on the PM task and equally benefited from emotionally salient cues. Specifically, negative cues increased PM performance compared to neutral cues in both groups CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: The findings are consistent with the multiprocess framework which postulates that salient PM cues increase performance by promoting automatic intention retrieval and reducing executive control demands. Children with ASD seem to show similar comprehension and accessibility to emotional cues as typically developing children.