Abstract
This study combined an event schema approach with top-down processing perspectives to investigate whether high-functioning children and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) spontaneously attend to and remember context-relevant aspects of scenes. Participants read one story of story-pairs (e.g., burglary or tea party). They then inspected a scene (living room) of which some objects were relevant in that context, irrelevant (related to the non-emphasized event) or neutral (scene-schema related). During immediate and delayed recall, only the (TD) groups selectively recalled context-relevant objects, and significantly more context-relevant objects than the ASD groups. Gaze-tracking suggests that one factor in these memory differences may be diminished top-down effects of event schemas on initial attention (first ten fixations) to relevant items in ASD.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 945-961 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders |
Volume | 41 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jul 2011 |
Keywords
- Autism spectrum disorders
- Event schemas
- Gaze-tracking
- Memory
- Top-down processes