Self-ordered pointing in children with autism: failure to use verbal mediation in the service of 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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2019, Psychology of Sport and ExerciseCitation Excerpt :Although verbal analogy is thought to encourage implicit motor learning (i.e., requires less conscious processing - Liao & Masters, 2001; Poolton, Masters, & Maxwell, 2006), processing of the verbal instruction itself still requires phonological resources from working memory. Previous studies showed that verbal working memory capacity in children with ASD was generally low to maintain and monitor goal-related information (Robert M. Joseph, Steele, Meyer, & Tager-Flusberg, 2005). The verbal analogy group in the present study may not have been able to fully grasp the motor concept of the analogy or to hold the task information in mind during the assessment phase when cognitive demands were high (i.e., retention and transfer tests).
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2018, NeuroImageCitation Excerpt :Measures of non-verbal working memory on a non-spatial and non-verbal self-ordered pointing task correlate with visuospatial memory in children with ASD but not children without ASD (Joseph et al., 2005a). In contrast, children without ASD, but not children with ASD, show a relationship between language ability and verbal working memory (Joseph et al., 2005a). Such heterogeneity may reflect differences in how individuals with ASD utilize visuospatial memory to augment non-verbal working memory, whereas individuals without ASD may utilize language to augment verbal working memory (Joseph et al., 2005b).
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2016, Research in Autism Spectrum DisordersCitation Excerpt :In fact, clear differences between the two groups emerged only for specific interactions between such factors. Consequently, these results are consistent with the findings of Joseph et al. (2005) and Mammarella et al. (2014), which indicate that the poor performance observed in visuo-spatial memory tasks is not widespread; however, in our study, individuals with ASD relied extensively on contextual information to recognize a specific item. Some of the contradicting results in the literature (e.g., Bowler et al., 2008; Joseph et al., 2005; Mammarella et al., 2014) may stem from the supported vs. unsupported nature of the task, as claimed by the Task Support Hypothesis (TSH) (Bowler et al., 1997, 2004).