Text | What can doctor Jingjin remember? Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have very strange memories. Some of them can be called memory geniuses, such as ten lines at a glance, unforgettable memory, "living perpetual calendar", "human camera", "scholar syndrome", etc.

text | Doctor Jingjin

What can they remember

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) Children's memory is very strange, and some of them can be called memory geniuses, such as ten lines at a glance, unforgettable memory, "living perpetual calendar", "human camera", "scholar syndrome", etc., and they will be addicted to memory of symbols, music, structural diagrams, markers, etc. Unfortunately, these abilities are basically of no practical use in daily life. At first, some ASD children showed excellent memory, which made their parents happy and excited. They felt that their children would definitely leave their bright life. However, they did not know that the endings were very different from their parents' wishes. The doctor: the strange memory of autistic children.

Many ASD children have special and extraordinary memory skills since childhood, and even remember a lot of information without a teacher and without remembering it through their own eyes, such as phrases, lyrics, circuit maps, maze maps, streets, structural maps, etc., and are mostly limited to their narrow range of interests. Scientists are puzzled by why ASD is unique and remembers a lot of information that is not very practical, and the memory capacity is very complex, strange, and even "deep". The problem is that the special memory of ASD has nothing to do with social life and learning, and the content of memory has nothing to do with daily life.

Memory is one of the important functions of the brain. Memory damage means that there is damage to the corresponding brain nerve function. There are many explorations and research on ASD memory, but the results are different and there are many different opinions. In medical testing, the memory ability of ASD is not used as a diagnostic standard, because the memory ability shown by ASD varies greatly and cannot be classified. For example, the memory performance of high-function ASD and low-dividual ASD is completely different, or even in the opposite direction, and the mechanism of memory impairment in the brain is completely different.

Early medical research even diagnosed ASD as "developmental amnesia", but this view was quickly denied (Boucher J. 2012). Neuropsychology research found that ASD actually has many impairments in memory functions, such as working memory (referring to short-term memory, usually used to solve invisible problems), speech memory and visual spatial memory. The impairments in these functions are related to their executive function defects (see the previous article: Working memory characteristics of autistic children).

Implicit and explicit memory

Psychology classifies memory impairment of ASD into two aspects: Explicit memory (explicit memory) and Implicit memory (implicit memory). The former refers to the memories and statements of things people experience, such as children's memories and descriptions of what happened in school. The latter refers to a process that does not require deliberate and automatic memory of things, such as the products and names that children see unintentionally when shopping in the mall. The memory of ASD children is not achieved in this way at all.

Ordinary people's memory has strong coding functions. Information can be classified, interpreted, programmed based on experience, and then memorized it. But it is almost impossible to count on ASD to remember information in this way, and their brain memory channels are a completely different routine.

study shows that with language function ASD, their social episodic memory (explicit memory) is significantly damaged, but their semantic memory is still preserved, which is still not enough to state their social experience, and is related to the damage to the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe region of their brain (Goh S Peterson BS. 2012). Whether it is low-function or high-function ASD, there are common damages to 's external memory function.

Implicit memory for low-function ASD may be superior to high-function ASD in some respects, and they basically do not use organizational strategies or backgrounds to support their memory. For example, they rarely use language or background signal associations to remember things, but instead accepts the information they touch with the disk like a camera, such as structure, graphics, lines, etc., but cannot remember the faces or people they saw not long ago (Boucher J. 2012).

ASD will not use effective encoding functions to remember information, nor will it flexibly use the conversion between visual and auditory memory. The memory function will gradually decline, and it is difficult to remember the complexity process of things, which is the so-called working memory damage. This will also affect visual spatial memory and linguistic memory, and their associated memory range is very narrow. They are much more difficult than normal children of the same age to recall their not long ago experiences, not just because of the difficulty of verbal expression, but can be attributed to their inability to use the memory strategy that children of the same age would use (Williams DL. 2006).

Whether it is high-function or low-division ASD, most of them show good implicit memory functions in childhood. Our team found that it was very difficult to perform memory tests on children with low-function ASD. They neither understood the test requirements nor cooperated with psychological tests. However, mild ASD will show a relatively complete implicit memory for non-social stimuli, and their classic conditioned reflex and the initiation of perception and concepts is basically normal or close to normal (Jingjin et al. 2022).

In fact, many ASD children have extraordinary implicit perception processing abilities in mathematics, art and music improvisation. Therefore, they show extraordinary memory ability and desire to express themselves in certain skill areas, but most of them gradually degenerate and disappear.

After all, the memory ability of ASD is related to many factors such as its cognitive level, interests and hobbies, degree of illness, personal strengths, family guidance, rehabilitation education, etc., so it will show colorful and diverse memory characteristics, which cannot be summed up in one sentence.

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