Visual-memory strategies employed by children of the autistic spectrum.

MAIDANA CAPITÁN, MELISA; ECHEVESTE, RODRIGO; SAMENGO, INÉS

Congreso; XXVIII Congreso de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias (SAN); 2013

Children in the autistic spectrum display anomalous capacities in memory and sensory tasks. Here we compared the visual memory strategies of children in the spectrum and a control group. We aimed at determining whether children in the spectrum are impaired in the ability to parse a continuous set of stimuli into discrete categories, and to perform subsequent mental operations (including storage in memory) with only the category label, ignoring additional stimulus details. To this end, we developed acomputer game where players were required to remember the sizes of a set of geometric figures. The responses of the players allowed us to evaluate whether figures were remembered using a photographic strategy (that is, by storing the images with no further processing) or whether only some specific features were remembered, as the category of the sizes (big, medium or small) or the comparison between the relative sizes of different figures (figure A is larger than figure B). To decide among thesealternatives we proposed several playing strategies that gradually ranged between a purely photographic strategy and others that had varying degree of categorical elements. Using statistical techniques we evaluated the likelihood of each proposal by quantifying the probability of obtaining the measured responses conditional to a specific strategy. The analysis demonstrated that a subset of control subjects employed strategies with categorical elements, absent in the autistic population.