Self-referenced memory, social cognition, and symptom presentation in autism

Atypical self-awareness may be fundamental to social impairments in autism (Frith & Happe, 1999; Hobson, Chidambi, Lee, & Meyer, 2006; Mundy, 2003; Russell, 1997). Disturbances in self-related memory processes may be one manifestation of this atypicality (Millward et al., 2000; Toichi et al., 2002; Yamamoto et al., 2004). Many studies have documented that self-referenced processing enhances word memory relative to other semantic forms of word processing (Symons & Johnson, 1997). Theory on this self-referenced memory (SRM) effect suggests that self-related information is processed within an extensive frontal network of associations and is encoded more deeply and efficiently than other types of information (Craik et al., 1999). However, unlike typically developing adults, Lombardo, Barnes, Wheelwright, and Baron-Cohen (2007) reported that adults with autism showed attenuated SRM effects and Toichi et al. (2002) reported that adults with autism failed to show a recognition memory advantage for words studied in a self-referenced versus general semantic condition. This literature suggests that SRM paradigms may be useful in examining the role of self-awareness in autism. However, most of the research on self-referenced word memory has been conducted with adults. Therefore, it is not clear if this paradigm is valid with children, or whether age impacts the development of SRM similarly in typically developing children and children with autism. It is also not clear whether SRM difficulties in autism reflect specific deficits in self-awareness or more general mentalizing deficits. Frith and Happe (1999) suggest that, just as people with autism have difficulty mentalizing the knowledge of other people, they may also have difficulty mentalizing self-knowledge. This perspective suggests that attenuated SRM may be an epiphenomenon of the social cognitive mentalizing deficits associated with autism. Alternatively, others suggest that while self-monitoring and self-awareness may be a component of social cognition, its impairment in autism may be distinct from mentalizing about others (Hobson et al., 2006; Mundy, 2003). These fundamental impairments in self-awareness and knowledge may, in turn, diminish one’s ability to integrate what is known about the self with what one observes in others, which is essential for social cognitive development (Mundy & Newell, 2007; Oberman & Ramachandran, 2007). To examine these issues, self-referenced memory, social cognition and social symptoms were assessed in a sample of children with higher functioning autism (HFA) and a matched comparison sample of children without autism. SRM was measured in a three-condition recognition memory task that required children to study words while thinking about whether the words: (1) described themselves, (2) described another person (Harry Potter), or (3) contained a specific number of letters. The following hypotheses were tested. Children with autism, like adults with autism, were expected to display an attenuated self-referenced memory effect. If this was specific to atypical self-related processes rather than more general mentalizing functions, then children with autism would perform less well than comparison children only in the self-referent condition. Similarly, any associations between memory performance and autism symptoms would be specific to the self-related processing condition and associations between self-related processing and symptoms would not be mediated by performance on social cognitive mentalizing tasks. If SRM deficits among children with autism are a result of general problems in person-related processing, or a mentalizing deficit (MD), HFA children would be expected to display poorer recognition memory for words in both the self and other conditions but not the letter counting condition compared to children in the comparison sample. In this case, memory performance in both the self- and other- processing conditions would be expected to relate to measures of social cognition and autism symptoms in the HFA group.