Episodic specificity, and therefore, autobiographical episodic specificity has been recently proposed as an important component of a range of cognitive tasks that involve memory and imagination. For example, Madore and Schacter (2014) showed that improving specificity (i.e., the amount and quality of details that people retrieve), improved performance on a problem‐solving task in normal young and older adults.
According to the “episodic simulation hypothesis” (Schacter et al., 2008) retrieval of past episodic experiences is needed to imagine future events and is crucially involved in means‐end problem solving.
In this context, Ciaramelli, Bernardi, and Moscovitch (2013) suggested that episodic simulation would also support theory of mind (ToM) tasks as well as in general most tasks involving self‐projection. In ASD, impaired ToM for oneself and others appears to be closely related to an impaired episodic autobiographical memory (Adler et al., 2010).
This suggests that diminished level of self‐consciousness and diminished social insight might reflect a common underlying deficit in autism (Frith & Happé, 1999).
As largely documented, children and adults with ASD exhibit diminished or delayed abilities to decode affective and mental states in themselves and others (Baron‐Cohen et al., 1985). The first‐order false belief tasks, such as “The Sally & Anne” task, usu- ally employed to assess ToM ability, consist in a story in which the character Sally does not witness character Anne transferring a ball from a basket to a box, and thus, she falsely believes it is still in its original location. Contrary to the more severe forms of autism, individuals with HFA may pass false belief tasks successfully. Specifically, they
often solve first‐order (e.g., “Sally thinks it’s x, when really it’s y”) and second‐order false beliefs tests (e.g., “Sally thinks Mary thinks x, but both Sally and Mary are wrong”; Bowler, 1992; Dahlgren & Trillingsgaard, 1996; Happé, 1995), although they might fail more “advanced” ToM tests, based on detection of sarcasm, irony, or bluff (Happé, 1994) as well as fail on recognition of faux pas (Baron‐Cohen et al., 1999; Zalla et al., 2009).
In everyday life, individuals with ASD find mindreading of both themselves and others relatively difficult, slow, and unreliable, and often attain only a fragmentary and incomplete grasp of knowledge of their own and others’ mental states. However, while it is commonly acknowledged that explicit ToM, which refers to the abilities to overtly attribute and consciously reason on mental states, might be delayed and not totally disrupted in individuals with HFA or AS, implicit ToM reasoning, which refers to the spontaneous and automatic sensitivity to others’ mental states, is generally impaired in ASD (Senju et al., 2009), and not alleviated by compensatory strategies (Senju, 2012). Because ASD individuals are thought to lack a devoted implicit ToM system (Senju, 2009, 2012), it is likely that in these individuals with normal intellec- tual functioning, access to both self‐ and other knowledge can be achieved by means of general learning mechanisms or compensatory cognitive strategies that differ from those applied by individuals with typical development (Happé, 1995).
Difficulties encountered in individuals with ASD when presented with advanced explicit ToM tests also suggest that impairments might concern the ability to integrate different types of information about the social scenario and to use them to infer the characters’ mental states (Zalla et al., 2009). Further empirical support for this hypothesis is provided by studies investigating the relation between intentional judg- ment and moral reasoning in adults with ASD (Buon et al., 2013; Moran et al., 2011;
Zalla & Leboyer, 2011; Zalla et al., 2011). These studies reported difficulties in using information about the agent’s intentions for moral reasoning in this population (Buon et al., 2013; Zalla & Leboyer, 2011), even when the agent’s intention is not misat- tributed. Along the same line, Zalla and collaborators (2011) reported difficulties providing appropriate moral justifications and evaluating the seriousness of normative transgressions in adults with HFA. The authors explained these results by a failure in integrating and using normative knowledge and information about the agent’s inten- tions and affective states in conscious moral reasoning.
Two non‐exclusive hypotheses can be proposed to account for these difficulties:
The first one—The Weak Theory of Mind hypothesis—relates to the lack of robustness of mental states representations; the second one points to the dysfunction in the inte- gration process of multiple types of information due to a diminished cognitive control in the ASD population.
With respect to the first hypothesis, several studies have shown that even when individuals with ASD pass first‐ and second‐order ToM tasks, they still show consider- able variations in their ability to use intentions in social reasoning (e.g., Buon et al., 2013). Thus, even when they correctly attribute mental states, they might fail to appeal to the agent’s psychological states when justifying their judgments (Zalla &
Leboyer, 2011). As shown by a neuroimaging study (Young & Saxe, 2009), the strength of activation in the temporo‐pariental junction region strongly correlated with participants’ ability in ToM reasoning (i.e., the exculpation of an agent causing accidental harm). This finding suggests that the more participants have robust mental states representations, the more they are able to use them in social reasoning task.
With respect to the second hypothesis, previous studies have shown severe impair- ments in cognitive control and mental flexibility in individuals with ASD (Barbalat, Leboyer, & Zalla, 2014; Geurts, Corbett, & Solomon, 2009; Hill & Bird, 2006). Of note, the ability to flexibly and consciously reason about a wide range of perceptual, contextual, verbal, and knowledge‐based information, as required for the explicit forms of ToM, might be cognitively demanding. While, in people with typical devel- opment, a considerable part of this work can be done automatically by implicit ToM processes, in individuals with ASD, who lack an early developing implicit ToM system, this might rely on generalized mechanisms, and in particular, through a process of explicit recollection of prior personal memories about the situation.
Corcoran and Frith (2003) found robust correlations between the strength of auto- biographical memory retrieval and ToM functioning in individuals with schizophre- nia, and proposed that, when people attempt to infer another’s mental state, they refer initially to autobiographical episodic memory and make use of past events to inform ongoing situations. Thus, understanding another’s mental state and self‐intro- spection may rely on autobiographical memory and inductive or analogical reasoning in order to retrieve analogous events from the past that might help to disambiguate a social scenario.
More recently, Barbalat, Leboyer and Zalla (2014) investigated the temporal organization of cognitive control in adults with ASD by adapting an experimental paradigm that modelled (a) the sensory responses that were most appropriate for processing the incoming stimuli; (b) the contextual control information (i.e., the incoming signal is adapted in time within a specific context), and (c) the episodic control processes (i.e., incoming signal is temporally distant from the subject’s response; see Koechlin et al., 2003). As in the seminal study, we used information theory to vary the demands of these control processes by modulating the amount of information conveyed by each control signals that is required for selecting appropriate representations for action.
For example, at the basic sensory level, the phone rings (stimulus), which usually triggers the appropriate behavior of picking up the phone (motor response). The contextual control level is involved in selecting appropriate stimulus‐response associa- tions according to the immediate contextual information that accompany the occur- rence of stimuli. For example, if on its screen, the phone displays the number of a close friend (context 1) while ringing (stimulus), people will pick it up (response), but if it displays the number of a co‐worker (context 2), the same stimulus might be asso- ciated to a different response, people might let it ring. In other words, the stimulus‐
response associations depend on the immediate context accompanying the occurrence of the stimulus. The episodic control level is the higher level of this control hierarchy, which is involved in selecting consistent sets of stimulus‐response associations evoked in the same immediate context according to the temporal episode in which the stimuli occur. Here, an episode is defined as a particular situation in which the person is act- ing, and which is based on past events, instructions or ongoing internal goals. For example, in the situation where a person is at home (episode 1), a call from a close friend (context 1) will be associated to a pick up response, but a call from a work col- league (context 2) will lead to a nonresponse.
In accordance with studies showing that individuals with ASD were impaired in the control of information conveyed by past events (Hare et al., 2007; Lind & Bowler, 2010), Barbalat et al. (2014) found that ASD adults perform as well as comparison
participants when they were required to control information conveyed by sensory and context control. However, they demonstrated decreased accuracy when they had to control information conveyed by episodic signals. Of interest, this specific deficit in controlling episodic information (and not of a general cognitive control deficit) cor- related with the severity of autistic symptomatology, as measured by the Autistic Spectrum Quotient (AQ) in both the ASD and the comparison groups: The more participants were impaired in episodic control processes, the more severe their symp- toms were. This study suggests an interesting relation between two consistent find- ings in ASD: executive dysfunctions (Geurts et al., 2009; Hill, 2004) and episodic memory deficits (Hare et al., 2007; Lind & Bowler, 2010). Episodic control allows the updating of specific association rules between immediate contextual signals and tasks‐sets to be performed in a subsequent temporal episode.
Such association rules are thought to be stored in episodic memory (Buckner &
Koutstaal, 1998; Koechlin et al., 2003) and temporarily in working memory. Episodic control is the executive component that supervises the retrieval of such information stored in the long‐term memory, and temporarily represented it as integrated, coher- ent, multimodal, episodic bindings in the Episodic Buffer (Baddeley, 2000). The epi- sodic control plays a crucial role in complex tasks such as learning, comprehension, and reasoning both in the intrapersonal and social domains: It is capable of retrieving prior information in the form of conscious awareness, and of manipulating and reflect- ing on that information. In doing so, the episodic control system allows the use of episodic memories and makes such memories available for other cognitive operations.
It also serves the ToM system for understanding intentions and mental states as well as executive functions for the selection of specific action plans and flexible switching between appropriate behaviors. The selective disruption of this episodic control sys- tem may explain why, in the absence of episodic information, both the explicit under- standing of other mental states and the self‐knowledge might be impaired in individuals with ASD.
Because of the reduced use of episodic autobiographical memory in social and intrapersonal judgments, children and adolescents with ASD fail to fully develop an interpersonal and narrative self. As suggested by Crane and Goddard (2009), the reduced ability of individuals with ASD to use self‐relevant cues to access episodic autobiographical memories indicates a deficit in using the self to organize memory retrieval. Of interest, Powell and Jordan (1993) noted that the development of per- sonal episodic memories depends on the existence of an “experiencing self” that codes events as part of a personal dimension. If the self is not constructed and involved as an agent in the process of memory retrieval, events are experienced and encoded at the perceptual stage in a nonsubjective way, that is, “individuals with autism would be aware of what was happening, but not aware that it was happening to them” (Powell
& Jordan, 1993).
The hypothesis of a selective impairment in episodic control is consistent with a more general Bayesian model of signal processing (Pellicano & Burr, 2012). This model depicts perception as a process of probabilistic, knowledge‐driven inference that matches incoming external (sensory) signals with a cascade of top‐down predic- tions biased by prior experience (the “prior”). According to Pellicano and Burr (2012), in individuals with ASD, priors are attenuated (“hypo‐priors”) with fewer internal constraints on perception, leading to increased sensory accuracy, but dimin- ished performance in situations where priors help resolve ambiguity. Social event
prediction might be particularly difficult if one preponderantly relies on external, observable evidence only, without being able to call on precise prior beliefs and memories to reduce the intrinsic uncertainty of social behaviors (i.e., to reduce the many‐to‐one mappings between causes and sensory inputs that characterize these behaviors; Lawson et al., 2014). Hence, in individuals with ASD, impoverished prior knowledge, and in particular, episodic information, would result in an incapability to reduce the pervasive uncertainty of the social world and make social interaction and action prediction more difficult, as recently demonstrated by Chambon et al. (in press). The disruption in the inferential mechanism that integrates sensory evidence into prior beliefs could ultimately be responsible for social disorders and reduced self‐knowledge.
Conclusion
To conclude, in this chapter, we reviewed how source memory and theory of mind might explain why individuals with autism exhibit autobiographical memory deficits.
We also demonstrated the impact of autobiographical memory deficits on the devel- opment of the self and how a reduced episodic specificity could interfere with social behaviors. We suggest that future research should tackle how to improve autobio- graphical memory in autism and assess the impact on a wide range of self‐projection tasks, including theory of mind tasks, reasoning tasks, or future thinking tasks. Such research could lead to the development of rehabilitation training programs and improve the quality of life for individuals with autism.
Take‐Home Points
•
Autobiographical memory is impaired in autism spectrum disorder.•
Source memory and theory of mind can explain some autobiographical deficits.•
Reduced autobiographical memory specificity can interfere with social behaviors.References
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