Self-ordered pointing in children with autism: failure to use verbal mediation in the service of working memory?

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Abstract

This study tested the hypothesis that children with autism are impaired in using verbal encoding and rehearsal strategies in the service of working memory. Participants were 24 high-ability, school-age children with autism and a comparison group matched on verbal and non-verbal IQ, receptive and expressive vocabulary, and visual memory. Working memory was assessed using verbal and non-verbal variants of a non-spatial, self-ordered pointing test [Petrides, M., & Milner, B. (1982). Deficits on subject-ordered tasks after frontal- and temporal-lobe lesions in man. Neuropsychologia, 20, 249–262] in which children had to point to a new stimulus in a set upon each presentation without repeating a previous choice. In the verbal condition, the stimuli were pictures of concrete, nameable objects, whereas in the non-verbal condition, the stimuli were not easily named or verbally encoded. Participants were also administered a verbal span task to assess non-executive verbal rehearsal skills. Although the two groups were equivalent in verbal rehearsal skills, the autism group performed significantly less well in the verbal, but not the non-verbal, self-ordered pointing test. These findings suggested that children with autism are deficient in the use of verbal mediation strategies to maintain and monitor goal-related information in working memory. The findings are discussed in terms of possible autistic impairments in episodic memory as well as working memory.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 24 school-age children with autism (21 males) and a comparison group of 24 non-autistic children (19 males), all of whom were recruited through community sources to participate in a study of language and social cognition. Participants in the autism group were judged to meet DSM-IV (APA, 1994) criteria for autism or PDDNOS by an expert clinician. Clinical diagnoses were confirmed using the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R; Lord, Rutter, & LeCouteur, 1994), an

Results

The two groups performed equivalently on the verbal span task, t(46) = 0.6, n.s. The autism group obtained a mean score of 5.7 (S.D. = 1.9) and the comparison group obtained a mean score of 5.4 (S.D. = 1.8). In order to evaluate the relationship between language level and task performance, a composite variable was constructed from the mean of each child's age-equivalent scores for the PPVT-III and EVT, which were strongly correlated in the present sample, r(46) = .84, p < .001. Language level was

Discussion

The SOPT assesses the ability to monitor a series of actions or events within working memory. We used the SOPT to test the hypothesis that children with autism are deficient in the use of verbal mediation strategies to augment working memory capacity and, by extension, to regulate action. Our findings supported this hypothesis. Children with autism performed as well as comparison participants in a non-verbal version of the SOPT. However, unlike the comparison participants, they did not show an

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development (RO3 HD37898) to Robert Joseph, and from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (PO1 DC03610) to Helen Tager-Flusberg, which is part of the NICHD/NIDCD-funded Collaborative Programs of Excellence in Autism. We thank the following individuals for their assistance in collecting and preparing the data reported in this paper: Sare Akdag, Kelly Ament, Susan Bacalman,

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