I recall reading somewhere some time ago that memories in autistic brains appear to form differently, but I can’t seem to find it anymore.
It was an article that mentioned how autistic brains seem to put more emphasis on factual events. For example. “Skin gets burned if it touches hot stove”. There is less of an emotional connection to the pain connected to that event, which was concluded as a possible explanation to why autistic children are seen repeating such actions more often than non-autistic children.
It also talked about how the forming of memories would allow one to for example learn to cook spaghetti, but can’t apply that knowledge to cooking rigatoni or penne.
Given that quite some members here have an interest and/or experience in autism, has any of you read the same or a similar article and know where to find it? I wanted to grab it for some fact checking as my autism palace was up for recall.
Can’t tell you about this article. Similar information is available on Wikipedia. There is evidence that the autobiographical memory of autists is often worse than that of ordinary people.
It really has to do with less mental self-awareness. As a result, they retain their primitive concentration on the world around them. Therefore, the semantic memory of autists is often better than usual.
I don’t know the article you are referring to but I do have some knowledge that can add to this.
One of the leading hypotheses (I don’t know if it is a theory) as to how an autistic person views the world suggests that autistic people lack a “filter” when experiencing something. When a regular person looks at a kitchen and you were to, for example, move a chair a few inches to the left, not much changes for the regular person, they still experience the same kitchen. Whereas an autistic person might experience a whole new kitchen.
This lack or less of a “filter” in the brain expains your spaghetti example and why autistic people struggle with change.
I didn’t know about this until a few years ago but it explained so much in my life. I have been with my girlfriend for 7 years now and for years I always felt uncomfortable going to her house, every time was a new experience, I could never get used to her house. The same was happening with work, I could never get used to my workplaces and basically everywhere else I went. Something was always off, I was never comfortable anywhere except my own bedroom. I also struggled with cooking too, I could learn to cook some meals but cooking at my girlfriends house? With their different stove? Heck no. My experience hasn’t changed. I’ve heard and read the experiences of others and they all experience difficulty with change, to the smallest details, suggesting that we all lack or have less of this “filter”.
It isn’t directly related to your main point, but the comment about feeling pain from heat reminds me of this article I recently saw about autism and nerves: https://www.aan.com/PressRoom/Home/PressRelease/3827
On the skin biopsy test, 53% of the people with autism had reduced nerve fiber density, while all of the people in the control group had levels in the normal range. People who had reduced nerve fiber density also were more likely to report feeling pain from the heat stimulus at a higher temperature than the control group.
Did the study specifically mention spaghetti? I searched for articles that mention “autism”, “memory”, and “spaghetti” but didn’t find one that used those examples.
I found these other interesting articles while searching.
First, the children with autism, compared to the matched controls, had poorer memory for complex information (many individual elements or one complicated element) in both word and picture form. In essence, the children with autism found it hard to remember information if they needed a cognitive organizing strategy to aid recall or if they had to detect such an organizing element in the information itself.
The authors speculate that, “People with autism don’t have the automatic cross talk between brain systems – the reasoning and the memory systems – that tells their brain what is most important to notice or how to organize it thematically.”
… Let’s say some teenagers see a poster for a new movie about a small-town romance. They talk about going to the movie and joke about the love story. One boy, though, interrupts with how great it will be to see a football film. Hearing this seeming non sequitur, the other kids stop talking. The boy, who has autism, doesn’t understand why they aren’t interested in what he is saying. He was responding to what he saw - not the larger-than-life stars embracing, but the small background detail of a man in a football jersey.
For example, Ben Shalom (2009) has recently suggested a 3-tiered model of cognitive functioning in autism, consisting of basic, integrative, and higher-order or “logical” levels of processing. Within a memory framework, the autism condition thus spares, or relatively spares, low-level perceptual and procedural information processing, while disabling the consolidation of higher-level or event-related information (i.e., episodic or autobiographical memory). Higher-level memory for context-independent facts (i.e., semantic memory), however, is thought to be either not affected or minimally affected and used to compensate for the lack of integrative episodic memory among high-functioning individuals. Similarly, others have suggested that the semantic or visual complexity and volume of information to be processed, integrated, and retained are key factors that define memory performance deficits in autism.
it didn’t mention it specifically, but that is an example that I remember from somewhere else. The article that linked to the study did mention the example with the stove, but I couldnt find that one anymore either.
Though the articles you linked are indeed interesting
I could find a lot there too yes, wikipedia is a great source of general information!
This is actually something that has fascinated me. While not fully the same, another thing does seem to be related to that. I always thought I was the only one, but it seems that this is present in such an amount in some people that they have brief periods where they feel “disconnected” from the world, able to see it all as it is happening without making any connections to emotions, experiences or ideas.
So not just a memory that forms that way, but a whole perception that happens like that.
The filter idea is one that I have always loved. Along with describing in terms of information processing. The article I remember is one that I loved because it hooked in on that, rather than on the fancy theories that are used to describe autism (theory of mind, executive function, etc.). It really hooked in on describing how information is processed, which was fascinating to see.
Моето дете е с аутизъм или ГРР.Има спомени за неща,които никога не бих се сетила.Спомня си почти всичко-от деня,когато сме ходили някъде(независимо къде),кои дни съм била на работа или болна,без значение коя година,
спомня си колко сме платили за такси, когато и където сме ходили. Има уникална памет,но има значителни затруднения в това например"дай ми хляба от шкафа"…
Google Translate:
My child has autism or ARI. There are memories of things I would never think of. I remember almost everything - from the day we went somewhere (no matter where), which days I was at work or sick, no matter what year , remembers how much we paid for taxis when and where we went. He has a unique memory, but there are significant difficulties in this, for example, “give me the bread from the cupboard”…
